You know you need to be certain of who your customer is to scale your business.
Customer research helps you learn more about your actual (or ideal) audience. It’s a deep dive where you can find out their preferences, motivations, buying habits, etc. And once you have this data, you can use it to create marketing strategies that target your ideal customer. This is also super important if you’re building a product or want to get new clients.
But customer research also matters to your engineering blog — after all, your blog reader is just another customer.
In this article, I’ll take you through a few quick discussions on why customer research is important for your engineering blog.
1. It allows you to understand your audience
You need to know who your audience is.
Are you writing for fellow engineers? Students? Industry professionals? What’s their background? How experienced are they? Do they have any specific interests?
You can find all that out by doing customer research. The insight you get from Google Analytics is invaluable, but you can also run a few surveys or ask for direct customer feedback to get answers to your most important questions.
Once you know your audience, you can also cater to their needs and adjust your blog to suit their interests.
Perhaps you also need to segment your blog — say, for example, you know that you have some engineering students turning to your blog for reference, so you can start creating content that’s tailored to them, in addition to the general engineering content you may already be publishing.
2. It allows you to create relevant content
This ties in with the points just made, but once you’ve done your customer research and understood your audience, you can begin creating relevant content.
If, for example, you’ve been creating content that’s only suited to very high-level engineers, content that’s full of technical jargon and very scientifically complex, but you’re finding out that many of your readers are actually on the fringes of the engineering industry, you know that you’ve been missing the mark.
These other readers are obviously still finding value in your content because they’re actively engaging, but they may find it a bit difficult to understand. So if you change your content strategy and start creating content that meets their needs better, you’ll quickly be on the winning team.
But it doesn’t have to be as detailed as that.
Even something as seemingly basic as knowing that your ideal customer tends to be male between the ages of 45 and 55 will help you figure out not only what type of blog content to produce but also how to present it. This could be both visually (i.e., the colors you use and what type of graphics you embed) and textually (the language and tone you use in your writing).
The more your website is catered to your ideal customer, the more likely it is that they’ll return to your blog more frequently.
3. It allows you to improve your blog strategy
If you start planning content that’s more related to your audience, you can also begin improving your overall blog strategy.
You can start planning ahead. Are there any industry events coming up that your audience may be interested in? Did anything particularly newsworthy happen in a town where you know a lot of your customers live?
If you know your audience, you can use these key insights in your blog strategy and plan to introduce content that’s 100% relevant to them.
It also helps you use customer data to drive your keyword research, so you can be on the lookout for industry trends or pillar topics that are particularly relevant to your audience.
This doesn’t only give you great new content ideas, but it also helps you build more rapport with your audience as they’ll start identifying that your content is meeting their needs more and more.
4. It gives you the chance to enhance reader interaction
Once you’re building more rapport with your readers, it becomes a lot easier to create a community feel.
Your blog posts and social media content can quickly turn from being very one-sided (you directing information at your audience) to being conversational.
You can post about something, which then sparks a discussion amongst your readers. If comments are enabled on your blog, your readers can ask you questions directly, or they can talk to each other.
They’ll also be more likely to share your content with their peers if they’ve found it particularly relevant or helpful.
Of course, these reader discussions can also help fuel more content ideas, as they’ll likely ask questions or raise concerns that you haven’t yet covered.
Importantly, if you understand your audience, you’ll also know how they interact with other platforms, and you can begin to feel more comfortable adding in CTAs, encouraging your readers to share your content with their peers or via the relevant social channels.
5. It helps you showcase expertise and authority
The more content you’re producing that answers your readers’ questions and the more you’re seen as the authority figure that provides answers and valuable information, the more brand authority you’ll gain.
With consistent efforts, your engineering blog (or your company) can turn from just another site into the thought leader or go-to authority on a particular topic.
This brings with it a world of business and brand opportunities.
And it can all start by simply doing customer research and understanding your target audience.
Targeting your customer with the right content
The first step is customer research and understanding your target audience. And then the onus is on you to craft excellent engineering content that meets your customers’ needs. If you need help with content creation, let me know. Drop a line here.
Customer Research FAQs
If you’ve just started your engineering blog, you may not have the necessary data to know who your audience is. In that case, start with either your offline audience — i.e., sending out surveys or asking for direct customer feedback — since your existing customers will likely share characteristics with your online audience.
You can also target an ideal buyer persona — i.e., identify who your ideal blogging audience would be, and use that as a base to plan your content strategy.
Your engineering blog is a living, growing thing — with that, your audience may evolve over time. You need to keep track of your content and how it’s performing, and adjust where necessary. If you’re seeing engagement drop and bounce rates increase, your content may have changed, or your customer may have changed.
By staying on top of the data, you can correct your course.
If you can use your current content and the people who are already reading it to check your efforts, that’d be a great move forward. For instance, you could include a small note at the end of an article inviting readers to share their thoughts and ideas. But you could also add pop-up surveys or feedback forms for more info — just make sure it’s not too spammy.
Of course, this gives you valuable feedback, but it also makes your readers feel more seen and heard, which increases reader loyalty.
Absolutely. Think about it this way. You may read an article that you find interesting, but you’re not particularly invested in the topic. So you’ll read it and move on with your life. But then you read an article that’s about something super close to your heart — say it’s about your hometown or a project you were just working on. You’d be far more likely to want to engage with that second article because it means more to you.
So if you focus your content on your customers, you’re far more likely to create something that means more to them, thus increasing the chances of audience engagement.
