Do you sometimes struggle to adopt the right tone in writing your blog posts? Writing a business blog sounds easier than it seems sometimes. It can be difficult to write appropriately for your readers when you aren’t sure who they are or what they might like to know. As a result, many businesses tend to write about themselves, their products, their services rather than what they can do for the consumer, rather than how their products or services can benefit their reader.
How do you get around that? The simplest way is to picture your target customer in your mind and even pin a picture of that kind of person (age/appearance/gender) to your office wall behind your desk.
(I was delighted to hear Philippa Davies talking about this last week at the ACT conference in Wales as I’ve written about it before and it was great to hear someone else having the same opinion)
Fill in the following details to help you visualise your target customer:
Demographics – age, gender, location, income,
Behaviour – What social media platforms do they use? Are they online to look for information? Are they accessing your website via a smartphone or laptop?
Aims – What are their aims? Why are they coming to your website (or your competitors’ websites as let’s face it, if they don’t find yours, they will go to your competitors).
Needs – What do they need? (this is different to what do they want). Do they need your service or product? Why?
Concerns – What are their worries? Their problems? Their questions? If you can answer their queries and resolve their problems (sometimes before they even realise it is a problem), not only will they find you but they are more likely to do business with you.
By meeting the needs and addressing the concerns of your target audience, you are making them centred to each blog post, thus maximising your success.
If you are struggling with the tone of the blog post, imagine you are chatting over a cup of tea while you are writing the post. Pin a picture of a suitable person in front of you and write as if you are chatting to that target customer. Make it conversational and edit it later once the tone is correct. Don’t use jargon for the sake of it – eliminate it if possible.
Do you think that makes it easier to write a more targeted and effective post?
Image: Free Digital Photos
