How to Leverage Blogging for Stellar Customer Care

With so many companies for consumers to purchase from, what often sets a business apart is how well it handles customer service. The care of your consumers’ complaints, issues and potential problems is a big deal; customers who have a hard time giving feedback or receiving answers to their questions may cease doing business with a company in favor of another option. Luckily, you can use your business’ blog to handle a segment of your customer care strategy; read on to learn how.

The Benefits of Blogging for Your Business

Blogging for your business may be time consuming, but it is worth the effort! Here are just a few of the benefits that blogging for your company can provide:

• Boosting your online visibility
• Positioning yourself or your business as the go-to expert in your field
• Giving you access to your target audience on a national (or international) platform
• Establishing industry credibility
• Amplifying awareness and recognition of your brand
• Increasing traffic to your website and social media accounts
• Providing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits every time you publish a piece of new content
• Allowing you to test new ideas and gauge consumer responses
• Involving your whole team; have them each write a blog post and rotate through a schedule to lighten the load

Another hidden benefit of blogging for your company is the ability to address customer questions in a more public format. Rather than answering queries as they arise, you’ll be able to share common FAQ’s right on your site so those looking at it can find the answers they need without needing to contact you directly.

Ideas for Leveraging Blogging for Stellar Customer Care

Try to Provide the BEST Answer

Anyone can answer a common question, but can your company provide the best answer amidst the social media noise? Setting yourself apart with relevant, well-researched advice will propel you to the top, making you look like a more credible resource than your competitors. Also share your answers on social media; Facebook is an excellent vehicle for spreading your company blog posts. According to Buzzsumo, a “Best Answer Post” includes these ten key elements:

1. Address the Question Being Answered: This sounds like an obvious tip, but Buzzsumo suggests making it clear that your audience is asking the question you’re answering, so people will pay attention to your advice. If you aren’t sure what questions are being asked, have a chat with your customer service or sales teams; they should have deeper insight.
2. Let Readers Know What They Will Learn: By promising something of specific value to your readers, they will be more likely to click through to the post and are ready to learn about your subject.
3. Demonstrate Credibility: If you are a store that specializes in all-natural food products, you wouldn’t write a post about learning how to boogie board. Likewise, the boogie boarding company probably shouldn’t highlight the differences between two health food brands. In addition to speaking on topics with which you have authority, you should also do lots of research to add credibility and authoritativeness to your article. When possible, bring in perspectives from multiple different sources.
4. Share Examples or Case Studies: Hard numbers are difficult to refute. Include as many examples, facts, statistics or case studies in your article as you can, and you will appear like the industry expert you are.
5. Be Timeless: The best answer you can provide is one that is timeless in nature. Buzzsumo illustrated an example of this, where are article Copyblogger wrote on writing good headlines was still driving traffic to the post after it had been published for more than seven years. If you write the best answer to a common question, it won’t become irrelevant. If you want to publish something that’s timelier, you can always update the article or provide a second look later on down the road.
6. Keep the Article Updated: As we touched on above, updating your articles regularly is a great way to make sure they are the best answer for your readers. Stay up on trends and update your article with the latest research, facts and figures.
7. Be Comprehensive: According to Buzzsumo (and strongly recommended by Three Girls Media), long-form content is king. Writing a post that’s comprehensive, well-research and authoritative can be done best in at least 1,500 words. Plus, that will give your SEO a boost.
8. Summarize Your Answer: If your post is long and detailed, your readers may not have time to take in the whole thing. It’s helpful to provide a summary at the top or in your introduction. Also, at the end of the post, summarize your findings in the conclusion.
9. Make it Scannable: Pay attention to the structure of you post. Is it broken into multiple subheadings or sections? Does it include numbered lists or bullet points? These elements will help your readers digest the post and read it quickly, while still understanding the main points.
10. Educate Your Readers: No one will read your article if they already know the information you’re providing. Be sure to provide some new advice, helpful insight or hot industry trend.

Write a How-To Article

It may seem counterintuitive to write a “how-to” article when you are driving customers to seek out your services, but giving away some of your secrets can have a positive impact not only on your customers’ perception, but also when blogging for SEO. Search engines give preference to sites that offer high-quality consumer-friendly content, so it can be beneficial to write some articles in this style. Just be sure to do these three things:

1. Identify and Write to Your Readers’ Needs

Writing to your customers’ needs is important when blogging for customer care; the first thing you should do after picking a topic is assess the needs of your readers. As the expert in the field, you likely know much more information than the average consumer. Think about information you would be most interested in learning if you had no knowledge on the topic. If you aren’t sure what customers are asking for since you don’t deal with them directly, try collaborating with your social media or sales teams to gain insight into common questions, concerns or complaints.

2. Include Relevant Keywords

Blogging for SEO depends on knowing and using the main keywords to make sure your topic gets ranked high in search results; this is also important for customer care since you’ll want to identify what keywords and phrases your customers are searching for when they’re looking for answers online. To determine what the main keywords and phrases are, all it takes is a simple Google search; this is an easy way to get started and see what others in your field are writing about.

3. Offer a Compelling Headline

If you spend precious time writing an article for your customers, it’s important to make sure you entice them to read it! Take time to craft a headline that will make them click and urge them to read more by using a noteworthy statistic or surprising new spin on the topic. Try using a headline tool that can help you score your chosen title; at Three Girls, we use this great one from CoSchedule.

Consider this blog post as an example! I’m assuming you were convinced to read this article based its title, especially if you’ve made it this far. I used CoSchedule’s headline tool to write it, but it wasn’t always this compelling. After revising the title four times (see the photo to the right) based on the feedback provided by CoSchedule, I landed on How to Leverage Blogging for Stellar Customer Care. Using a tool like this can help you identify weakness in your headlines and help you revise them to be the best they can be.

By using blogging for customer care and answering common questions directly on the company website, your customers will appreciate how accessible and easy to work with your business is. On the other hand, you should also learn as much about them as possible to best serve them. Here are five questions you should ask your customers.

5 Questions to Ask Your Customers

1. How did you find out about us? This will help you determine which outreach efforts are working, and help you determine where you should be allocating your marketing dollars.
2. What do you feel sets us apart from our competitors? It’s always a good idea to find out why your customers come to you instead of another business in your field. This can also help you identify areas of opportunity or challenges you are facing.
3. Did you visit our website? If so, did you find it helpful? Getting feedback on your company website or blog will help you provide stronger content and become a more valuable resource to your customers.
4. If you had a problem or issue, did we resolve it? If so, please share details. You’ll want to make sure all of your team members are responding to situations quickly, thoroughly and professionally.
5. Have we made it easy for you to provide feedback or get ahold of a customer service representative? This will help you assess the strength of your company’s customer care efforts.

For more tips on business blogging, check out these additional articles:

3 Blogging Tips for Newbies

11 Ways to Create Shareable Posts [Blogging Infographic]

[Digital Marketing] 7 Common Blogging Mistakes

Blogging and Social Media for SEO Results

[Business Blogging] 4 Reasons to Blog for Your Company

Are you ready to leverage blogging as a customer service strategy? We’d love to help you connect with you clients and customers! Contact us today for a complimentary consultation with our CEO for advice and tips on how to make it happen!

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