How To Attract, Persuade & Serve Customers Using Your Blog
Before we deep dive into what a start up should focus on when blogging, let’s quickly define what a start up looks like (this will be important in understanding the kind of content a start up should be blogging about).
What does a start up look like?
Lots of great ideas – a start up will generally be driven by an entrepreneur who has many great problem-solving ideas.
Limited Funds – a start up typically has limited funds for marketing & advertising.
Limited Time – a start up typically is driven by one person (or a small team) who has to find time to wear the hat of all functions within the business (finance, marketing, PR, planning, Vision etc etc)
There are a lot more identifying factors but to identify the best way to use blogging as an effective tool to grow a start up, the above will do.
Looking at the above 3 characteristics we can identify how to avoid common blogging traps that will miss the mark with your target market, waste your time, money & effort.
All from just looking at the 3 characteristics?
Yes !
3 Blogging Principals Any Content Idea Needs To Tick To Be Effective For A Start Up
Connect the content with your target market not your products/business
Start-ups have great ideas to help people solve problems – be it via their products or services.
The problem with this is that many start-ups get too wrapped up with the features, functionalities, details & technical side of their products and services they sell. They forget that many times the customer doesn’t even know they have a problem…
For example a client of ours sells Keto Shakes on their eCommerce store.
A portion of their market are Keto fanatics so yes the details of the products what’s contained and how it was derived are very important to them.
However the majority of their market just wants to lose weight?
They don’t care about how many grams of carbs are in a Keto shake, if it contains immune boosters or if it’s grass-fed whey protein… all of this stuff at this stage of their journey is foreign.
All they want to know is…
How do I lose all this stubborn fat FAST?
So the content that is going to attract them is not a product description but rather something like a blog titled “Little Known Ways To Lose Stubborn Fat FAST While Still Eating All The Foods You Love!”
Within the actual post you’ll still have plenty of opportunity to pitch the readers with your ecommerce links and business philosophies… but to make a blog post attractive it needs to provide simple & fast answers to their emotional problems.
Your content needs to give you the biggest bang for buck.
Rather than just picking random ideas to write about it’s time to get strategic about topic choices.
You can do this in several ways.
- Survey your customer list and uncover their biggest questions and needs.
- use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords/phrases/topics that get a lot of search volume and optimise your content around these.
- Find already popular topics proven to drive traffic. Using a tool such as ahrefs you can use their “content explorer” functionality to find the most shared content on any topic. Once this has been identified you can drill down further using the “content gap” tool to work out sites and keywords sites rank for. Using this information you can work out what your content should look like so it becomes share worthy & drives traffic via the search engines.
In short. don’t focus on ideas you want to share with the world, instead focus on ideas the world wants you to share with them.
Your content should be powerful low cost marketing material that attract maximum attention and traffic to your site.
Your content needs to complete/automate business functions.
We’ve already discussed the need for your content to act as marketing material rather than just ideas discussed on your blog.
But to really make the most of your time the content should also act as other business functions.
To give you an example, here at Websites That Sell we provide SEO services to companies all across Australia.
What the client really wants is more traffic, conversions and sales.They don’t care about how SEO works or what needs to happen for them to get the desired result. However for us to demonstrate the difference between good & bad SEO a level of education needs to occur.
Now we could spend hours with each client teaching them the principals of good SEO.
But rather than doing this we provide more or less a free university of the basics of SEO as free content on our site.
This way we are selling to properly prepared prospects automating the function of consultative selling.
Now the clients understand that we don’t use automated tools, we don’t outsource to non English speaking countries but use Aussie writers to create awesome content and we do outreach in variety of ways to attain links. This all shows what needs to happen to do things right but at the same time educates the market that we aren’t a cheap SEO company – we complete tasks to the highest quality standard and get SEO right the first time.
To work out what you can automate in your business, simply ask yourself the following questions:
- what are the most common questions we get from prospects?
- What does the prospect need to know before they can make an educated buying decision?
- What can we reveal (which the competition doesn’t) that will position us as the experts?
Following this framework of thinking you now not only create content that is relevant to your market, but will also automate selling & market education tasks so you can focus on growing your start up.
Following this framework of content creation you can now plan out your entire blogging calendar for the year. At every step consider will this content connect with my audiences emotional triggers? Will it serve as marketing material with the potential of attracting shares and rankings? And will it help eliminate labour intensive tasks? If done correctly this should be the only way a start up should be thinking about creating blogging content.
Now go and create blog posts that:
- Connect with your target market
- Add powerful low cost marketing to your arsenal
- Completes/automates various business functions all at once.
David Krauter is a marketer first and a “techy SEO geek” second… this approach enables him to provide SEO results that deliver traffic, leads & sales – not just rankings. David’s fused approach to marketing & technical SEO gives his clients the competitive advantage of not just a “run of the mill” linking campaign but a strategically architected SEO campaign that builds a websites online presence/authority AND delivers results!
Having worked on over 550 SEO campaigns since 2007, David is well aware of the constant changes that affect website rankings and the resulting traffic from Google. David continuously uses his knowledge, experience and data across active campaigns to give Google exactly what they want and keeps his clients websites one step ahead of the SEO pack.
