Key Product Features to Include in Your Business Blog
After a great weekend you are back at your computer wondering what in the world to post for the daily blog update. Daily posting is key to building your business blog into a center of traffic for your business area or niche, but sooner or later, your idea factory runs out of fresh material. What to do? Read on for a few ideas.
For more ideas on using your business blog to attract new customers, contact SEO Consultants Denver by clicking the “Contact Us” tab.
————————————————
Key Product Features to Include in Your Business Blog
People do business with your organization if:
- Your product or service is valuable, and
- Your organization can be trusted to delivering that value.
Centering your blog or page topics on these two areas always makes good copy. Still, coming up with new and fresh ideas is difficult, but try looking at these reasons for ideas.
Every organization has a ‘story.’ These stories –or bits of them anyway- are interesting to others. If you have good relationships with your customers, investigate why they continue to buy or do business with you. These stories should be retold on your blog.
How to proceed? When thinking about your current customers, identify instances in your relationship when:
- Unique value was provided
- Feedback was delivered
- Customers achieved success
Unique Value:
The law of unintended consequences holds that there are actions and reactions that were unforeseen prior to initiating action. From the customer’s standpoint, these may take the form of ‘good ‘results that were unforeseen when the business relationship began. These would be interesting tidbits of value that you may not have realized you were providing.
Examples of this might be something like – your product occupies less floor space than your competitor’s product, which makes your product more profitable per square foot of retail space. Or… the service is available overnight when other competitors don’t provide it. Highlighting your product or service advantages is the end game, but using your clients and customers to tell the story adds credibility to your value proposition.
Once identified, you should be able to tell the story from the customer’s standpoint. Profits were improved because floor space didn’t have to be re-allocated to sell your product. Or, by receiving the service on an overnight basis, a business day was essentially gained in waiting for the service result. In the end, Unique Value stories always center on your customer’s ability to realize value (or profit) by utilizing your organization for product or service.
Feedback:
A good business relationship provides useful feedback regarding your product or service. Customers look at the value you provide in a much different way than you do, so it is useful to solicit feedback on a regular basis. This of course can be scary. A proprietor doesn’t necessarily want to bring up issues where service might be ‘falling short,’ but without getting that information early, the company may not get the opportunity to continue the relationship. Generating honest feedback is a good role for a senior manager or owner and has to be undertaken with the objective of ascertaining the true value of the product or service from the customer’s standpoint.
Frequently, this exercise returns highly valuable information. In retail areas, this feedback might include issues such as ineffective packaging or shipping irregularities. Items not directly related to product quality might arise as obstacles to future business. Customers will be quick to tell you if the cost is too great, but other areas might require some prodding. Once you have this information, it can make a great story.
These stories might also be a good opportunity to point out why certain service or product changes were made. They might also include statements on how your organization was able to improve profitability for a client or customer by making certain product or service modifications. This not only illustrates your responsiveness to client concerns, but establishes credibility – specifically surrounding your willingness to serve your customers.
Customer Success:
Of course every customer wants to be successful. Your job is to illustrate how your organization helps her/him achieve that success. Customer stories that show how your product or service helped take advantage of a certain situation or opportunity are highly valuable and entertaining. Additionally, establishing yourself as a key part of the client’s ‘team’ also validates the part your organization plays in the client’s success story. Customer success stories should be a frequent inclusion in your business blog.
Once you have assembled your post and told the story – optimize it! There is a fairly easy way to do this. Title the post in the form of a commonly asked question or a statement you hear in the industry. This might wind up looking something like “How a corner store increased weekday sales,” or “How can I sell more during my offseason?” Admittedly, these are generic titles, but by setting the question or statement in a form that prospective customers might use, some search engine traffic might be generated because of the way you set the title.
So use your blog to not only tell your story, but tell your customers’ stories as well.