As you grow your company, social media becomes ever so important. The use of social media to reach a larger audience in a shorter period of time can boost sales and your company’s visibility. Creating a buzz through the use of blog posts can help attract new customers and keep existing ones coming back. These blogs can provide customers with product information and updates on new product lines.
Before the blogging begins, one of your biggest challenges is finding your company’s position in the industry. To find your place, you must check several factors which include: determining your target market, identifying your customers, identifying product or service characteristics, identifying what makes your product or service different from the competition, determining your marketing strategy like discounting or product differentiation, and listening and acting upon customer feedback.
Finding Your Niche
Your business needs to find its niche. A niche is the filtering of a larger group of consumer into a smaller specific group for a particular product or service. You identify the needs and wants of the specific group and focus your attention on them. There are four steps that can help you identify your company’s niche.
These steps include:
Knowing your audience
Getting to know your audience can come from different sources. These sources may come in the form of surveys, keyword web searches, and online forums. The surveys and forums can provide you with information on their likes or dislikes and possibly any problems they encountered. While the keyword web searches can give you more insight to what the consumer is trying to find. When you understand your customer’s needs and wants, you can focus your attention to the details and provide them with the best possible product or service.
For example, your targeted group is using a specific keyword in their search. The keyword is not returning the product they are looking for. Your company can use an online forum to find out what the group is actually looking for and determine if your product meets those needs. Then that keyword can be added to the search options.
Identifying your passions
When you love what you do you strive to do your best! You can ask yourself a couple questions to help you identify your passions: if you had no limitations, what would you do? Which subjects peak your interest? Which problems from your audience do you want to answer?
Once you have identified your passion or love apply them to your niche. The application of that love will not only help you do your best but keep you interested. Thus, when you are interested in something you tend to search for more information and learn all you can. Knowledge is power!
Having knowledge of your competition
Knowing your competition allows you to separate your company, product or service by its unique characteristics. Identify your differences to stand out from the crowd. If you focus on those differences the customer will remember you. Remember, different is good and use it to your advantage!
Knowing your potential
Before you jump in with both feet, test the waters. When you have identified your niche make sure that it can sustain itself monetarily. Not every niche will work, so test it with a sample group to make sure you are on target. Do not sink your own ship! Listen to your test group, make changes, and if necessary abandon that niche. Sometimes failing at one idea brings about a better solution.
Addressing Audience Pain Points
The audience pain points are the problems the potential customer encounters. These pain points can range from financial, productivity, processes and supportive. Each of the pain points requires you to address the problem and provide an acceptable solution.
- Financial Pain Point is a problem with the pricing. Generally, the product or service is priced too high for the potential consumer. The possible solution may include a temporary price reduction like a discount coupon or a long term solution of researching a production alternative to reduce costs which can be passed on to the customer.
- Productivity Pain Point is the inefficiency with the current production. The possible solution is a change in production or developing a more efficient production system.
- Process Pain Point is the inefficiency in the processes. A solution can include a review of the processes for better time management.
- Supportive Pain Point is the lack of support for the customer. This pain point can be critical. If customers do not receive the support during the sales process, they may get frustrated and go elsewhere for the product. The solution here is to listen to the customers and provide the necessary customer support to ensure a great experience!
Keyword Research
The customer needs to find you, so, having the right keywords are important. Knowing what keywords your customers use is a step in the right direction. Adding applicable keywords to your product searches will filter traffic to your online sites.
Online and social media are great tools! Creating the right avenues to direct traffic to your sites is key. These avenues need you to find your niche, highlight your products uniqueness, listen to your customer’s problems and provide solutions. These tips can help make your blog posts become more effective and increase your potential customer volume.
