Indirect Methods of Learning What Your Customers Want

Learning their likes and interests without directly engaging them.

In a previous post, I discussed the importance and benefit of starting a dialogue with your customers in order to find out the types of content and topics that they want from you.  In this post, I’m going to go over a few other ways that you can gain insights into the types of content in which they might be interested, to supplement when you cannot directly engage with your customers. I tend to recommend these two posts in tandem rather than stand alone advice, as they work well together and give you a well rounded understanding of what is interesting, relevant and meaningful in terms of how to build your content.

Following Industry Trends

The big names in your industry put a lot of time, effort and money into developing or determining what the next industry trend will be.  Following these companies, their email newsletters and/or blogs, as well as their social media is a great way to both learn what is going to be big/popular among your current and prospective customers, as well as to gain content to share.

Let’s put this into practice with an example.  Say I owned a boutique gift shop that specializes in home decor and accents.  There is obviously going to be a seasonality to my industry and with my customer needs.  IE around November, customers will be looking for the perfect Fall accents for their Thanksgiving dinners, and around Christmas they will be in need of a unique and meaningful hostess gift that’s seasonally appropriate.

There’s a good chance that you are already following some of the large decor/lifestyle magazines and brands to find out what to stock.  But these are also great examples and inspiration for content.  They’ll have articles focusing on the perfect Thanksgiving table scape or what to get the hostess who seems to have everything.  They’ll also have high quality photos to go along with these articles.

Here are a few ways you can leverage these resources for your content.  You can combine these two for the maximum effect.

1. As actual content on your website.
2. By sharing their content on your social media sites.

Lets’ say Better Homes and Garden shares an article on decorating for Thanksgiving that focuses on using natural foliage to bring the beauty of the outdoors in.  Knowing that this is going to be a big trend, I’d merchandise my store so that it featured items using natural or natural looking reproductions of fall foliage.  Then I’d photograph these pieces, and write a post on ways to use the beauty of nature to enhance your home cooked meal.  Pairing the two of them, I’d create a series of social media posts and newsletters to share this content.  In my post, I might even link out to the article that inspired this post, to show that I’m speaking authoritatively on the topic.

As I schedule my social media posts around this content, I’d go out to the Better Homes and Gardens social media and grab their social media posts, and share them, while referencing the items that I carry to help you capitalize on this hot new trend.  In this case, I leverage the power and authority of the larger brand name, to show my customers that I offer what they want, locally, and with a personal touch. If you’re really good at this, you’ll also insert the link to your post, so that you can send your traffic to your post first, and give them the option to go one step further to the original topic if they’d like.

Keyword Research

A good way to round out listening to the large industry leaders, is to listen to what volumes of people are looking for on search engines.  If you have a Google Analytics Account (which you should if you are creating content online to track the performance of your content and make adjustments and informed decisions in the future), you have access to Google Adwords.  Don’t panic.  I’m not telling you to spend any money here. Inside Adwords is a tool called “Keyword Planner”.  While this tool is offered so that advertisers can make informed decisions about their ad spend, you can also use it to learn what people are searching for on Google.

Using this tool takes bit of guesswork and might require a bit of searching around on the internet before jumping in.  In this case, if I had looked around and found that acorns are it this year, I might search for “Fall acorn decorations” “2018 acorn decor” and “innovative ways to use acorns in your decorating”

This tool will give me a list of relevant keywords on this topic, how competitive it is to rank for these words (ie how many people are searching for these terms and how many advertisers are trying to rank for them), and what the bids would be if you wanted to pay for search advertising.   Looking into the keywords, I may find one that has low competition and a decent number of monthly searches and I’m off to the…writing of the blog post.  Or, I may find that I need to dig a bit deeper to find a relevant topic, with medium to low competition.

Pinterest

For this specific industry, and others like it, Pinterest is a wealth of information.  By developing and using a robust Pinterest account, you can help drive traffic to your site, while also discovering ideas for new types and pieces of content.  Try using the same keywords you used in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to see what types of images pop up.  Then click through to some of the posts behind the photos and see what types of content are being shared on the topic.  You might even get some new ideas about how to display your current products, as well as more products to offer in your location.

Pinterest now also allows you to keep boards private, or “secret” and to invite others to view and add to these hidden boards.  These hidden repositories of ideas are great ways for you to save interesting and inspiring posts without sharing them to your audience, giving you time to create your own version of the post and share it.