These days, everyone and their brother has a blog. Having and regularly updating your blog content is just treading water in the social selling world of today. Companies without blogs are falling further and further behind. What you do with your blog is the big difference between treading water and pulling ahead of the pack. Use these steps to stand out from competitors.
Focus content on customer pain points
Your sales team should have whole documents written up about why your product or service is valuable. What’s the pain point for your customers? Why are they willing to pay you money to give them a hand? In most cases, it’s pretty clear. If you run a carpet cleaning service, the pain point for your customers is the look and feel of their dirty carpets.
Now, expand that pain point and jot down some blog ideas that surround it. For a carpet cleaning company, this is fairly easy. Blog about wine stains. Blog about mildew in the floor. Blog about why steam cleaning is better for shag carpeting. Identify a paint point in each article and expand on it. This will help you reach customers with a very specific complaint. Even if your business revolves around something more abstract than carpet cleaning, the same principles apply.
Add value to the conversation
To pull ahead of your competition, your blog has to become a resource in itself. Your blog shouldn’t just be a string of thinly veiled advertisements for your business. There should be real content and substance there that adds to the conversation. If you’re an accountant, write up a blog post about what the proposed estate tax increase could mean for the middle class. If you offer tutoring services to bring children up to grade level, blog about the pros and cons of standardized testing. Build your blog into a repository of knowledge.
When possible, try to think between one and two steps removed from the product or service you offer. If you only write about what you do (“Seven Reasons You Need to Hire Me!” style blogging) people coming to your site will get understandably suspicious. When you write about something that’s closely related to your business, but not literally your business, you show readers that your company is knowledgeable, helpful, and trustworthy. To return to the carpet cleaning business, think about it this way. Are you more likely to hire a company with blogs like “The Science Behind Removing Wine Stains” or one that just says “You can’t get out wine stains yourself, hire me”? Providing information and background establishes your company as experts.
The more high-value content you load onto your site the more people are going to keep coming back to read it. Building a following for most businesses is an uphill battle. Very few people want to read about carpet cleaning three times a week. Your chance to get ahead of the competition lies in making your content interesting and applicable—and not just an advertisement for your business. Find your customers’ pain points and think one or two steps removed to build a site full of great content that will really set you apart.