Blogging to help your customers is a great way to add value, create reputation and assist with search ranking. Once you decide to start blogging, you’ll generally find you’ve got a lot of things you want to talk about and producing new content isn’t difficult. After a while though, finding interesting & relevant topics will become of the hardest things to do. If you have a clear idea on who your customers are, blogging to help them is a great way to come up with unlimited content that’s both useful and positions you as an expert in your field, or at least someone who knows what they’re doing.
Some of the ideas you can use as blog topics are:
Case studies from current clients
After all, who doesn’t want a bit of free publicity.
- You can do the post in a variety of formats depending on what suits the topic best, and which you feel most comfortable with.
- You can do a regular text blog, a pictorial showcase, an audio podcast or a video interview.
- The topics can be anything relevant such as what your client does
- How you helped your client out,
- Spotlight a specific product or service a client offers or uses
- Or a general discussion on how they got into business, what are their top tips for businesses, why they chose the profession they did.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Create a FAQ by blogging about:
- The questions that clients ask you as a basis for your blog posts
- Answer specific product or service questions, and more general industry questions
- Any questions are relevant, even if you’ve only been asked once. After all, for every one person who asks, there’s probably a couple more who’ve just moved on to the next company.
- If you don’t have that many questions being asked, use the things you don’t get asked, but wish people knew about
- You can go into more detail about, or even feature items from, your Terms and Conditions.
Tips or How-To’s
- Tell your clients how to do something that you do for them
- Tell people how to choose someone to do whatever it is you do for them. After all it’s not only your clients who will come to your website, and not everybody who lands on your website is your ideal client. The quicker you can figure out which is which, the better for everybody.
- You can use text. flowcharts, videos and screen captures to go step by step through a service you provide, or a how-to-use a product you sell.
- Do a flowchart on “how to decide if you need a…”
General industry knowledge
Show off your industry knowledge and let your clients know that you keep up to date with the latest developments.
- You can share news in your industry
- Share the latest scientific and technological developments that might have an impact in your industry
- Cover news about leaders in your industry, but be very careful not to turn into the TMZ of your industry though, we want news – not gossip!
- Create an infographic covering an interesting aspect of your industry
- Do a report on a conference, seminar or event that your industry recently held
Sell yourself
Because when it comes down to it, that’s what we’re all here for
- Feature a new product or service you offer
- Post about a sale or special offer you have
- Blog about seasonal deals or “blog reader only” offers
Note that these shouldn’t be done too often as you risk making your blog irrelevant.
Give an insiders view of your business
- The more clients get to know your staff, the more involved they’ll feel and the more likely they’ll be pleasant to deal with because they see the staff as people, not just jobs, and they’re more likely to continue to stick with your company as long as the service is good.
- Do profiles on your staff members. Start with the ones clients have contact with regularly, like whoever answers the phone, the accounts team, the sales team, management.
- You can do posts about company news, such as new premises, awards you’ve won, certifications gained by your company, or by members of the team.
- Post opening hours over holidays and even better, give people an idea of what to do if something goes drastically wrong.
- Blog about seasonal parties your company holds, whether they’re internal company events, or client functions. Just make sure the cameras are off after the wine starts getting low – the last thing you want is someone live blogging your CEO doing a drunken face plant as they fall while dancing on the table.
So that’s it, there are a tonne of ways you can blog to help your clients, and if you sit down and plan out a couple of months or even a years’ worth of posts, you’ll have no problem when it comes to finding content every month, week, or day. One last thing I will say though, is no matter how awesome your plan is, stay flexible. That way if something really exciting or dramatic occurs, you can change the topic of the next blog and stay current.
If you’d like some more ideas, check out my previous posts about blogging
Click here to book a complimentary 30 minute catch up to discuss how I could help you with your blogging.
