Engage your brand’s target audience with unique ideas & quality content.
Building a blog, posting occasionally, & “contentless” text speak isn’t enough to drive visits from your brand’s target audience.
To get most from your blog it must be relevant, as well as engaging. Develop a project plan to create/curate content & for populating it to your blog & brand social presence . Ideally, this content will support your marketing efforts while pulling in targeted traffic from the web. As we’ve already said, traffic (readers) can equate to increased business for you. This means your plan needs to be solid & your content must appeal to your brand’s target audience.
Understand & identify with your brand’s target audience to decide message tone & content style.
Plan & brainstorm what types of information will be most engaging to them. What does you audience need to know about you, that make you stand out? Once you have ideas in place, you’ll also want to consider how best to gain attention from the search engines. Using the right Search Engine Optimization techniques can pay off here with traffic & exposure elsewhere on the Internet.
Know Your Brand’s Niche & Their Needs.
Who is your niche audience? This might be the most important question facing you as you move forward with plans build your brand through blogging. If you don’t know who your likely readers are, you will not be able to tailor content to pull them in & keep them coming back.
There are a number of things you can do to determine your brand’s target audience, if you have the funding.
You can hire a market research company (see market info) to assist in generating demographic information as it relates to your brand & its products or services.
If you can’t afford market research, you can ask yourself these questions to focus your efforts better:
- Who are my products for? If you are trying to build a brand for baby care products, chances are you already know your target audience. You want to pull in young mothers & fathers & perhaps grandparents. Your blog posts will need to appeal to them & will need to offer them information & even advice they can use.
- Who would I like my products to also appeal to? – Going back to those baby products, perhaps you have a great customer base of parents already but would like to increase sales through grandparents & friends. In this case, your target audience would also include these people. That means you’d want to make sure your message & posts appeal to them, as well.
- Am I going after an unusual niche? – Maybe you don’t sell products at all but want your brand blog to appeal to a specific kind of reader. If, for example, you’re a woodworker & your blog will be about this niche topic, you’ll want to set your message to appeal to beginners, novices & even pros involved in this hobby.
Once you have a good idea of who your blog will target, it can help you better plan content & style guidelines. These are important for assisting you in selecting &/or creating content that not only builds your brand but also appeals to your brand’s target audience.
Tips for Setting the Tone & Style that appeals to Your Brand’s Target Audience.
Having a basic outline of what can & cannot appear in marketing efforts & your blog is very useful. Some of the things to consider including in your guidelines are:
- The basic writing style – Do you want your blog to be highly informal & conversational? Perhaps you’d like to create a news blog & establish yourself as an authority on a specific topic? You do have freedom in determining the writing style but keep your goals & your target audience in mind when doing so. Once you select a style, try to stick with it so your readers know what to expect when they visit your blog.
- The types of posts you’d like to appear on your blog – With your target audience in mind, brainstorm a list of the kinds of posts that would be acceptable & those that might not be. If you’re selling baby products, you might want posts about your products, baby care in general & even health care. Related posts about how mothers can better care for themselves could also fit in quite well. You might not, however, want content that deals with raising teenagers. Keep your focus area fairly tight & you can establish your brand & your credibility much easier.
- The “rating” of your blog – Will your target audience be mostly adult or is it likely that children will also visit your site? Keep this in mind when setting the “rating” for your content. If your branding efforts are meant to sell certain products that might appeal to an entire family, you’ll want think G or PG in regard to ratings. If you happen to sell racy, intimate products or you’re building a branded news site related to adult topics, a punchier R rating might be more in order in regard to content & style of writing. Again, it is very useful to define your target audience first & set content guidelines accordingly.
When you know your audience & focus your content toward your brand’s target audience, you will be well on your way to creating & delivering content that matters to your customers. Still, you are going to need to know how to reach out & pull in visitors. Search Engine Optimization can help out immensely here.
