Finding a steady supply of fresh topics is a top barrier for entrepreneurs and small businesses when it comes to updating their websites or blogs. The most fertile source of fresh content ideas for your website and blogs is: your customers!
Make it a point to always ask your customers and prospects what’s on their minds. Find out what kind of barriers they encounter when using your products and services.
Image: Flickr, by D Sharon Pruitt, Pink Sherbet Photography
Here are 15 ideas for staying on top of the kinds of how-to information your customers are having trouble locating online or offline.
1. Pull ideas from everything in your business that comes directly from your customers. Check out recent customer or prospect emails, incoming calls, and service reports. Think about the issues that customers discussed in your recent conversations.
2. Keep your site’s frequently asked customer questions up-to-the-minute. Explain how to solve today’s pesky problems. Update that stale FAQ page you put up 2 years ago.
3. Answer questions that your customers never remember to ask. (At least not until they are stuck.) Write how to information for questions that customers should ask you and that slow them up when using your products.
4. Your prospects probably have a different set of questions than your current customers. Make sure each one of your ideal buyer personas (prospect types) can find website content that appeals to them on your site.
- For a consumer business, your ideal buyer personas/prospects might include grandparents, parents, spouses and friends. These other types of buyers for say a women’s product that’s given as a gift, will have different questions than your primary buyer—the woman who knows exactly what she needs.
- If you market and sell to other businesses, your prospect buyer personas may include ‘ purchase influencers’ such as, office managers, purchasing managers, human resource managers, staff accountants, or other job functions in addition to the CEO or business owner.
5. Be generous by sharing insider tips, little known techniques and ‘work-arounds’ for solving your customer problems.
6. Talk about the fun topics your specific customers enjoy. If you sell children’s items, talk about a new movie or DVD that your kids loved. If you sell to businesses (B2B), write about recent industry news that may be light hearted or humorous.
7. Ask your customers what upcoming regulations or laws they are concerned about. Especially for B2B companies, create content about tough industry issues facing your customers. Share your viewpoint on upcoming legislation/regulations or share both the pros and the cons of a recently passed law.
8. Share your customers’ success stories when using your products/services. Prepare brief case studies about how individual customers solved a problem, saved time, or saved money using your stuff.
9. Prepare anonymous customer success stories. Some customers won’t be comfortable allowing you to publish his or her name, or company name. So write an ‘unnamed’ story.
An anonymous success story example might be: “A Midwestern based manufacturing firm successfully solved XYZ problem. This is how they did it. And by the way they used our blue widgets.”
10. Publish website articles on topics that your competitors are missing. After asking your customers what’s on their minds, scroll through your competitions’ websites to determine what key topics are missing.
11. Create the kinds of rich, new media website content that’s not available on your competitors’ sites. Is anyone else in your industry doing online video? If not, be the leader and create videos for your site. How about slide shows or (audio) podcasts?
12. Post website or blog content that’s “in your customers own words”. Interview your best customers. Conduct a short (3 to 5 question) interview with your customers via email. Or video them answering 3 short questions. Best of all, the answers are “in your customers’ own words” not in your industry jargon.
13. Tap into your partner network for topic ideas. Ask your partners for the top problems they see with your shared customers. Ask partners to write a customer-problem-solving article or a series for your website.
14. Provide genuinely helpful customer-viewpoint information, tips, strategies, tactics and ideas. Use your product names sparingly. Today’s buyers have tons of choices when searching online to solve problems and purchase products and services. Your number one goal is to share knowledge. Then create a relationship. And then to sell.
15. Feature a selection of original photos. Create a website article or post for your blog that shows pictures of your products in action.
Stay relentlessly close to your customers and far ahead of your competitors. Every chance you get, ask your customers , “…what else can we help you with?”. You’ll have no shortage of topics for fresh articles, blog posts, pictures, videos and interviews to update your small business website.
Any other ideas for customer-friendly website or business blog topics? Do share in the comments below.
Gold bars image: iStock
Thanks for the advice… I am guilty as charged of letting my blog sit dormant for weeks on end… My hope is that I can start implementing some of you tips and turn the corner.
Hi Ray,
Businesses that rely on customers finding them online will soon realize that with all of Google’s changes, a business blog is their best friend.
A small business blog with content you own, on your own self-hosted website is–YOURS!! No matter what Facebook or any other social networking site does.
And–in order to participate in social media, you need something to share!!
Whew, rant over… Thanks for stopping by.
Cheers,
Cynthia