Target-Your-Customers

Blog Strategies: Writing to Different Target Markets

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How can you adjust your blog strategies if your business needs to reach different customer segments?

Let’s say you sell accounting software to big businesses, small businesses and freelancers. Clearly, you wouldn’t want to send the same marketing message to all of these groups, as it can be confusing. Sending a mixed message turns off your potential customers. If you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.

Content marketing is no different. It may not be feasible to set up three different blogs to have a separate one for each audience. Instead you’ll need to find creative ways to connect with each customer type without alienating the others.

Your blog strategy should provide relevant content for customers, AND appeal to all of your target markets.

Strategy 1: Designate Days for Different Targets

Many companies find it beneficial to cover different subjects (or target different audiences) on different days. For example, for the accounting software above, you could break your content down to:

  • Corporate Accounting Mondays
  • Small Biz Wednesdays
  • Freelance Fridays

Each day could correspond with content delivered to that market segment. If it’s clearly labeled as a Freelance Friday post and you’re not a freelancer, you’d just skip over reading that post. It also makes it easy to sort by content type when viewing Categories on the sidebar of the blog.

Strategy 2: Find The Tie That Binds

It’s not impossible to create content that appeals to many audiences, though you do have to be more careful to ensure you’re not alienating anyone with your generic post. For your accounting customers, tax season is always a big concern, no matter the audience. So find ways to incorporate each of your segments into a single post. You could cover deadlines for corporate, business and individual tax filing, or provide tips for each group in a single post.

Strategy 3: Write and Rewrite

It’s possible to start with a base article and modify it for each audience. For example, a blog post about choosing an accounting program could be your original content, then you could modify it to address what corporations would care about, or the concerns of small businesses. This way, you get more bang for your buck with a single article.

Strategy 4: Separate Them

If your separate client bases are strong enough to sustain individual blogs, go for it. Especially if you have different marketing strategies for each, or different pricing and packages. You might even separate your product websites so that small businesses aren’t looking at corporate pricing and thinking they can’t afford your services.

If you have the resources (read: writers and money) to manage multiple blogs, make sure they’re highly targeted to that demographic, and include content relevant to that type of customer. If you have the staff, assign different writers to each blog so that they can focus on the style and type of content that audience will best identify with.

Develop Individual Strategies

Whatever method you use—and you might try a combination of several— make sure you have a solid marketing strategy including and excluding your content marketing to reach each individual target segment. Know your buyer persona and understand that each segment might have a different way they prefer to be marketed to. For example, your corporate clients may not appreciate your efforts on social media, while your small business clients do.

Pay attention to what’s working, especially with regards to content, and do more of what’s most effective, and cull what’s not. For example, you can easily go into your Google Analytics platform and view the blog posts that are generating the most traffic. Consider these topics that your audience is most interested in, and find other ways to cover related topics. Over time, you’ll figure out what appeals most to your different segments.

I know there are a lot of things to consider when crafting a blog strategy that works best for your business. Often it helps to consult with an outside expert who knows the ropes. I’m here if you’ve got questions on how to make your blog an active lead generation tool: 703-728-1336. Let’s talk.