When you get right down to it, getting some choice real estate on the 1st page of a Google Search is critical for just about any business. Creating relevant content on a blog can help give you a lift and get your name in the right location. The location part is easy to think with. But what’s with this relevance thing?

I wish there was a super simple answer.  If you want to be super technical, here’s a super link: http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

Otherwise, let’s pick up relevance on the human side of the story.

Are You Like Me?

Consumers (your target market, whatever niche that might be), tend to want to connect to people just like them. See, I just gave away the whole secret. You can be relevant to your consumer, if you give them the chance to meet your other customers online, and let them see that your existing customers are just like them.

Honestly, I’m not trying to talk in a riddle. Here’s the answer explained another way: get your customers to participate in your marketing campaign.

By inviting past customers and other consumers to participate by telling their story, and sharing it on your blog(s), you can create relevance.  It also shows you value your customers for more than just their money. Such a sign of respect can generate appreciation and often all you have to do is ask for feedback.

Tips

• Make it easy to share by providing a landing page with a form to capture the customer’s story, feedback, testimonials, etc.
• Give your customers an incentive to tell their story. A weekly or monthly drawing, contest or just an automatic prize such as a Starbucks Gift Card will go a long way.
• Make sure you have a way to moderate content.  Sometimes spammers or generally grumpy people will get a hold of your blog and use it as a platform for their message. If it isn’t relevant (or appropriate), there needs to be a way for it to be removed.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just read something, and it would be applied in full in your company by the time you got to the end of the article? Alas, somehow it never works out that way. But if you still don’t know how to be more relevant to your target market, that just means you don’t know enough about them.

Any marketing campaign suffers without some kind of consumer analysis. It is well worth the money to invest in effective market research data collection, regardless of whether you are writing simple blog posts or engaging in direct response TV ads.  Really understanding the minds of those you are trying to communicate can increase your relevance (in their minds) many times over.