Write for Your Audience

At the heart of every blog post, you should be thinking about your audience. Will your customers find your blog interesting? Entertaining? Or helpful? If not, abandon it and start again with something they’ll enjoy.

Don’t worry about search engine optimization at this point. If you are writing for your target customer and providing high-value content, you’ll show up on search engines anyway. If you want to try and weave some SEO magic into your writing, ensure this is never at the expense of quality.

 

So, What Do You Customers Need to Know?

What knowledge do you have that your customer needs?

With furniture design, there are lots of possibilities. They might come to you for:

  • Ideas and inspiration: If someone is buying furniture, they are probably looking for ways to use it, style it, or style an entire room. You could ask interior designers to write some guest posts or talk about beautiful rooms containing your furniture. Write about unique ways your furniture has been used, or if you’ve created something slightly obscure, you might want to introduce it to your customers and tell them how it should be used.
    Alternatively, think of things your customers struggle with and then introduce a few of your products to solve these problems. Bad back? The right chairs could help solve that. Storage an issue? You could have the solution!
  • Crafty articles: Show your customers how they can create easy home furnishings themselves and then show pictures of how they would look displayed on your items. For example, cushion covers are relatively simple to make – anyone with a sewing machine, some fabric, and a few hours to spare can make them. And you have just the chair to place them on!
  • Product comparisons: Why not create a few posts playing off a couple of your products against each other? A little more fun than a simple buying guide, this highlights the benefits of your products while helping your customers make a genuine purchase decision. And including the cons of each product shows that you are trustworthy.
  • Listed articles: Everyone loves a list, don’t they? And these blogs always do really well on search engines. You can list your top five Christmas gifts, the seven best sofas for proper lounging, or the top three best-selling wardrobes. Notice how I’ve only used odd numbers? For some reason, our brains prefer odd numbers when it comes to reading lists, making your blogs likely to be more popular.
  • Current trends: Keep up to date with the trends in your sector and then relay them to your customers with some pieces of your own that will fit in. Everyone wants to be up to date with the latest trends, and your blogs can make sure they are! You can also include blogs about what might be fashionable in the future and seasonal ideas, such as how to rearrange your home to fit in your Christmas tree!
  • Colour ideas: While some people focus on features, others are obsessed with colour schemes. This is likely to be an image-heavy blog but be sure to point out the exact colours of items you’ve used and mention how they fit in with current trends. Or maybe point out which celebrities have used this colour in their homes.

Many of the biggest brands will go off-topic on their blogs and talk about subjects that don’t have much to do with their offering. These businesses have the benefit of a captive target audience. While you are starting out, however, you should be trying to attract people to your website to convert them to paying customers. So, keep your blog focused on its job: building authority and confidence in your brand.

And if you need help, you know where I am!