Why should users in your market read your post, with all their gazillions of other choices?  It starts with this: because you post about exactly what they need to know. But how do you find that out?

Before you type so much as a word of your posts, you’ve got a job. And that is to discover what your typical users are like, how they speak, and especially what they need as expressed in their questions and personal stories. 

You want to know the problems they are trying to solve. You want to ask them “what are you trying to do that’s not getting done?”  

When you know that and can answer that, you are on the road to a bull’s-eye post. At that point, it’s up to you, your talent, imagination, optimization skills, and storytelling chops. But before that, you’ve got some work to do. 

“You have to know your readers”

Rand Fishkin, cofounder of the SEO pioneer Moz.com, and recently a founder of SparkToro, an audience intelligence platform, commented to us:

“Blogging is a crowded, challenging field, and one of the few ways to stand out is to create content with unique value for a specific audience. To do that, you have to know your readers: what they pay attention to, what resonates with them, how they describe themselves, what they talk about, what matters to them. Attributes like those will let you craft titles, headlines, visuals, research, opinion pieces, educational materials, you-name-it that resonates."

Don’t: run with what everybody in your company “knows“ to be true about your customers.  

Do: go straight to the people in your mark

Jump to:

Reaching people you don’t know

Be introduced to customers or followers

Make friends with sales folks in your company

Reach out to bloggers and influencers

…And now that you know them

Ask for a quote

Utilize LinkedIn (with care)

Other Tools and Apps

back to bloggers and influencers

Using comments on your own posts: The Content Pyramid Method

Creating a persona

FAQ

That’s fine, I hear you saying, except you are probably asking me to reach out to people I don’t even know. Easier said than done.

Yes, that’s a big part of it. Most of it, if you are in an agency. I don’t remember saying it is easy. But it is doable. 

Fortunately there are processes, skills, venues and tools at your disposal. You will get in touch with your audience, you can do market research without spending a fortune. And so, relax, it’s fun, and hey, you get to meet a lot of interesting people. 

So sit back, it’s what this post is all about. 

Where do we find people willing to talk to us? Your own organization is a fine start. 

Your brand has attracted clients or followers; yes even if you are a start up. They have followed a journey that has led them to your company, they are happy about it now, but as with everyone, they weren’t always convinced. They are your first stop, and if, say eight or ten customers or followers are comfortable being interviewed, that may be all you need.  

Seek out customers or followers who are sociable...and honest. You don’t want a pat on the back. You want the real picture. 

Your marketing or sales people can often put you in touch with existing clients who are likely to agree to an interesting talk or interview. 

Speaking of whom, salespeople themselves are on the front lines of client contact, and well know both the positives, and the hesitations of prospects.  If you can get their attention, and cooperation (not always so easy—they are busy!) salespeople are a terrific source. 

Fellow bloggers and influencers in your field are often willing to discuss their audience.  If so, they are a terrific way to discover what’s on your users minds, to see things through their eyes. 

Yet here we come to the first instance of the cold outreach: you may know some influencers already, but chances are you will mostly be reaching out to people you don’t know, and who don’t know you. So, here is the prime directive for reaching out to people you don’t know...get to know them.  

Read their blogs, listen to them on podcasts, watch them on YouTube, follow them on LinkedIn or Twitter or other social media. Comment on their posts, or email them. Do as much of this prep work as you can, in a style that is your own.  If you are not comfortable with cold emails, for example, try something else. 

After this prep if you genuinely believe you both can benefit, call or write them, underlining your common interests or activities. Be transparent about your need to understand the people in your market. 

Keep in mind that this is an informational interview, or conversation. That’s it. It’s not a pitch. 

(There are other reasons to reach out to bloggers, influencers and others, namely to promote your posts. And yes, that does involve a pitch. We will explore blog promotion in a future post in this series. )

One approach to influencers or bloggers is to create a post of your own about your market, and its audience and trends.  Write to influential people you think may agree to contribute and ask them for a quote.  Now you have some information, a much better post, and they have a backlink. A classic win-win. 

This may seem like a long shot if you are just starting out, but you may be surprised. And this is an approach that will grow with you. As your site develops more authority, more people will be willing and anxious to receive links from it. 

LinkedIn is an invaluable tool for outreach, especially, but not only, for B2B contacts. Because you can search for people in a very targeted way on LinkedIn, it’s an incredibly efficient way to find people who are or may know people in your audience. 

But caution: notice that cold contacting people “you don’t know and trust” is outside LinkedIn Professional Community Policies, and bad LinkedIn etiquette. In fact, people can respond to your invitations by ticking a check box labeled “I Don’t Know This Person.”  If too many do so, your LinkedIn account can become restricted. 

But they won’t, if you approach this sensitively. 

How to do so? Again, get to know them. Follow them on LinkedIn. Join a common LinkedIn group. Or follow and DM them on Twitter, which is much less restrictive about follows. 

Making the connection

When you are ready to make an invite to your LinkedIn network, never simply click on the “Connect“ Button on a person’s profile page.  Instead, click on “More“ and “Personalize Invitation.” Then you can include a brief comment explaining how you know them, and your interest in connecting. 

Finally consider this LinkedIn shortcut: you can ask a common contact for an introduction. If you search, as we recommend, for second degree members, then you will have a common contact, who may be willing to make the introduction. 

While using LinkedIn this way takes some effort of course, remember, your aim is to find a small number of people who can put you in touch with your market. For this goal, you will not need to (and should not) contact massive lists of prospects. 

There is a fertile and ever widening field on the web for digging out painting a picture of what your users are asking, talking about, what they’re like. Some are apps, which directly or indirectly can give you this information.  

SparkToro

A relatively new, and uniquely valuable app, SparkToro says it’s built to “Instantly discover what your audience reads, watches, listens-to, and follows.” Created by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin, the app digs deep into social media, painting a picture of the profiles you want, (not simply a list of mentions).  In our usage, we have found it invaluable. 

Quora is a free question and answer site, with a clever social model, rewarding for frequent and popular answers. Just enter a keyword phrase from your campaign, and scan through the plentiful questions and comments which result. 

Yahoo Answers, a similar site. 

Feedly A smart news reader, with an AI feature called Leo, helping you to track topics in your interest. 

Answerthepublic.com claims it “listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around your keyword.

It’s a goldmine of consumer insight you can use to create fresh, ultra-useful content, products and services. The kind your customers really want.”

These phrases are categorized by their first  “intent words“ such as “what“, “how“, “can.”  

Answer the Public also includes a visualization, which we find problematic—totally cool but functionally problematic—but that might just be us. 

You’ve already found some influencers if you’re following along earlier. Focus on their posts about topics which are in your own space and then the payoff: check out the comments.  What are users saying, asking, and objecting to. In the comments you may find a gold mine of questions. 

The Content Pyramid is a variation of the above method, this time using comments on your own posts.  Select a topic, and write a post. Watch for interesting, especially controversial feedback in the comments.  Then create a post based on those more intriguing comments. 

Want to take it a step further? Look for comments on your second post, and create yet another iteration based on that feedback.  At this point, you should have a richly developed blog post, speaking directly to issues from your users. 

The next step? Once you understand your audience thoroughly, empathetically, then it’s time to encapsulate this knowledge in a form called a persona.  Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand. 

Personas can be detailed like this amazing one using an app from Venngage, or simpler and hand-made. Either way, they are your main deliverable.

Personas can become the center of your brainstorming, content creation, and content strategy.  See creating a persona for more. 

Yes, user research is an effort. But it’s incredibly interesting, not to mention the fact that you will meet and incredibly interesting people. 

More practically, once your audiences is profiled, you’ve got a deep foundation for all content. (See The Hungry Monster Guide to Campaign-based Blogging for instance). 

Or, if you outsource your blog services, to an agency like ours, make sure that agency does the work. 

Interested in digging deeper? Talk to an expert. 

Guide to Campaign-based Blogging FAQ

What are the benefits of a blogging campaign?

• Powerful way to build brand awareness

• Provide deep-dive valuable content for leads

• Audience and market research right up front: one and done

• Builds focus on user needs

• Create opening for shares, and back links

• Extraordinary boost to SEO (Google visibility)

How do reach users in order to understand them?

• User interviews, indirect profiles (from salespeople, for example), behavioral analytics apps like Google Analytics, HotJar, Google Data Studio, SparkToro, SEMrush, Ahrefs and many others

What is human-centered design?

• First, by design we mean designing everything from graphics, to blog posts, to your entire website. It is the process of starting from the point of view, the needs, the personality and habits of your prospective followers or customers. The delivers solutions based on their needs.

• How can other bloggers and influencers help me create great content?

  The blogger and influencing community often works together, trading ideas and quotes. Do not see other bloggers as rivals, but as partners, from cross-selling to reputation building.

•