Blogging carries with it a history of introspection, with bloggers writing about what is going on in their lives and organizations. If your reason for blogging is to attract and engage customers, then your posts need the additional filter of relevance to customers.

Blogging about what you are working on any given day won’t necessarily attract more potential customers to your site. But tuning in to the value that customers see in your organization, and using the blog to provide thought, background and ideas related to that perceived value may interest current customers and even attract new ones.

Think of a business blog as a cousin to the personal blog, rather than as a twin. Like a personal blog, a business blog serves as a valuable outlet for personal expression. It helps connect bloggers to customers, providing a direct channel for communication helping to form strong relationships at all levels.  But first customers have to care about you are writing about.

So how do you know what customers care about?

Every business has customers. And the more you can involve your bloggers with customers, the more they can hear directly what is on customers’ minds, and then they can write about it.

Now, I am not recommending that you share a client’s specific concerns.  But you can certainly listen for the issues that clients want to address in meetings, and turn those around into blogging topics.

For example, my team and I were in a client meeting last week. The agenda focused on three topic areas: 1) the client’s sales pipeline activities and building a supportive sales culture; 2) processes for evaluating new opportunities and applying resources; 3) marketing messages and web site copy supporting sales for a couple of product lines. These topic areas translate quite nicely into blog post ideas that, by our customers’ attention and participation in the meeting, we can say would be relevant to them.

More specifically, here are a few blog-post ideas that derive from the agenda and discussion with our customer last week:

1. The Power of Narrative: Why case Studies Work for Technology Marketing
2. How We Test Your Value Proposition and Marketing Message
3. How We Write Effective Web Copy For Technology Companies
4. Writing Case Studies from Prior Employment
5. How Technology Companies Can Generate Leads With On-Line Articles
6. Giving Your Web Site a Job to do: Using Your Web Site as a Lead-Generation Engine
7. Using Google Groups to Coordinate Marketing Projects
8. Who in your Company Should sign off on Marketing Content
9. Make your trade show investment pay off: Set up meetings before you go
10. Getting Ready For Trade Shows: Typical Time Lines
11. When Engineering Companies Grow And Build Sales Cultures

Customers at the meeting leaned in, or sat up and focused on all these points over the course of a half-day working meeting.  Listening during meetings with customers can generate specific, relevant topics that simply reflecting on our own thoughts cannot.  Companies that want their blogging to be relevant and attractive for new customers should listen to what current customers are saying, and then follow through by writing about it on their blogs.

This also implies that your employees should blog about the aspects of their jobs that require interaction with customers. And when that is not possible, customer-facing employees should identify and share topic areas based on what they are hearing from customers.

Gary Hamel has a great blog post today on WSJ.com about how many industries are suffering from what he calls “Detroititis,” that is, failing to ascertain what your customers want, or in many cases, simply not caring what your customers want.

Detroit, obviously, is seeing this problem with the automobile industry. Since they failed to produce energy efficient or innovative vehicles, Americans went elsewhere.

Photo: Marcin Wichary

Hamel writes about how the PC industry saw the same thing when Apple introduced the iMac. Customers really did want a computer that was pretty. And for many, pretty trumped cheap. PC makers didn’t get it, or maybe, didn’t want to believe it.

Unless your company has a monopoly on a particular industry, can it afford not to care what the customers want? Can it afford not having a clearly developed and tested value proposition? If you don’t invest in developing your unique value story, be prepared for customers to go elsewhere.

The value proposition, as discussed last time, helps companies focus on growth markets; that is, on products and services that their customers want to buy. By focusing sales resources on the value proposition where customers are most receptive, sales performance improves. As resources are re-deployed from lower-performing products, the cycle feeds on itself, increasing payback on your sales and marketing investment.

But no one is brilliant enough to write a perfect story from whole cloth. And besides, we aren’t so much telling our client’s story, as searching for the aspects of our client’s story that resonate most with their customers. In effect, we are closing the gap between our client’s version of their story, and how that story is heard by customers. Closing that gap is how we define customer quality.

We test the value proposition by using it. By selling. We sell for the client using the new story.  We tell the story and observe where customers see the most value. Selling is the best way to gain feedback and adjust the value proposition.

In the testing phase, our sales executives work with our marketing consultants to produce sales scripts, selling pieces, updated price sheets, proposal forms, deal documents, everything necessary to complete the sales kit prior to roll-out. By getting all the pieces in place, sales professionals hired later to ramp up sales can be effective and productive right from the start.

Keep in mind, most of our work is with business-to-business (B2B) clients. So usually our customers have a relatively small number of valuable customer relationships.  Like us, our clients build their business one relationship at a time. Therefore, investing in a focused value proposition, or selling story, provides a high return on investment, a high ROI.

At Bizmanualz, for years we have helped companies improve their business results by improving their operations with policies and procedures, and with strategic process improvement consulting when asked.

Now as customers demand it, we are focusing more resources on our consulting practice. In addition to expanding our business policies and procedures publishing on-line, three experienced consultants—I am one—help clients reach their strategic objectives; typically growth and/or exit, via increases in operational efficiency and sales.

My focus is, and for years has been, marketing, especially business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Effective marketing work typically starts with strategy; developing and testing a company’s story, otherwise known as its value proposition. A value proposition is really about focus. Focus comes from asking and answering big questions: ‘What exactly do you do, and for whom? Why are you better or different than competing solutions? Do your customers see your value proposition the same as you do? What do customers say they actually pay for?’ (See my series of posts on deploying a New Business Council to weigh what new business you will pursue, and to ration what resources you use.)

We test a company’s value proposition with in-depth interviews with our clients’ current and past customers.  Invariably we expose gaps between our clients’ view of their value, and their customers’ view.  It’s an eye-opener. And it helps clients focus on what is important to their customers.

By clarifying a company’s value proposition, we help our clients redirect resources to projects that are in line with their strategy, getting  them closer to their growth or exit goals.

Next in this thread: With Focus Comes Growth – Lead Generation