Product-Focused Blogging Vs. Customer-Focused Blogging

Blogging is a popular concept even if some don’t understand the full details of how it works. Instagram folks throw around the word, and content marketers sing its praises on mountain tops. Even 59% of them consider it extremely valuable. And if you’re in the B2B space, you can generate more leads with a blog.

Blogging is an essential marketing strategy that most businesses cannot afford to ignore. It can help you differentiate your brand from the lot and boost engagement. However, most businesses are oblivious to these two different approaches to blogging: Product-focused and customer-focused blogging.

How do you identify the differences between both approaches? Which is better for your business? Stick around to find out these details.

There are currently more than 600 million blogs across the globe with 1.9 billion websites and 77% of internet users digest blog content to gain awareness about a brand or make a purchase decision.

What is blogging and why should you care?

Blogging involves creating articles for a company’s website or page to communicate with, educate, and inform the target audience. It is one of the major resource centers prospects visit to learn about your company and the products you offer.

Your website blog is a medium for you to cover everything that concerns your business with the consciousness of how it impacts your customers. With blogging, you can create a deep impression about your business that will stick with your prospects.

What is product-focused blogging?

This approach to blogging places special emphasis on describing the products a company sell. Product-focused blogging projects the product’s features, price, availability, and relevance in every article created.

It celebrates the features with the intent that the exceptional characteristics of the product are enough to get customers interested. This approach is like dangling a fancy toy in front of different people across age groups, hoping it would suit them.

Product-focused blogging implies the benefits of the product to customers. The content leaves the customer to decide without considering whether it suits their needs or not. This approach can be effective when a customer is already looking for the specific features of a product.

However, if a business is trying to use content to attract customers across different levels in their buyer’s journey, it will become challenging to use the product-focused approach to drive tangible results.

The danger of using this approach for your website blog is that you could promote features and functions that only very few people care about.

What is customer-focused blogging?

Customer-focused blogging is an approach that centers content decisions based on the needs, concerns, and desires of the ideal customer. With this perspective on blogging, content creators and marketers invest deeply in understanding their customers to increase the likelihood of success.

Since customer goals and expectations keep changing, every customer-centric business needs to perform the necessary research required to meet customers’ needs. Customer-focused blogging requires that you discover how every content helps your customers even before thinking about the products your business offers.

Customer-focused blogging requires that a company views every product or service offered from the customer’s perspective. This involves amplifying the benefits, showing empathy, and addressing a customer’s pain points while providing actionable solutions to suit their specific needs. This approach to blogging makes customers feel heard and provides an avenue for you to provide a superior customer experience.

Which blogging approach is the most advantageous?

Product focus is a more traditional way of marketing products than being customer-centric, and this has been shown in website blogs. Before, businesses believed blogs were an avenue to flaunt products and attract customers with their new products. However, this approach was only effective when businesses had a lesser number of products and limited features.

In this digital age where over 30% of purchases are made online, the product-focused approach is found wanting. Users interface with numerous products each day and sometimes, these products have similar features that make purchases difficult, the only way out is customer-focused blogging that highlights how each product helps the customer to make their decision-making process smoother.

Also, businesses with a website blog that prioritizes providing impeccable experiences have higher tendencies of standing out and doubling revenue. Ultimately, customer-focused blogging proves to be more profitable since customer behavior and expectations keep changing globally.

4 key benefits of customer-focused blogging

Research by Harvard Business Reviews shows that customers with superior experiences with brands spend 140% more than those with bad experiences. This shows that any business that places customers as the center while creating content for their website blog can also attract massive benefits, including the following:

1. Increases referrals

Despite the impact of the internet on businesses, referrals still play a major role in helping a brand gain visibility. Customers are more eager to refer their friends, family, and loved ones to a website blog that helped them solve a long-lasting problem.

2. Boosts customer retention and loyalty

There’s hardly any brand that’s solely dominating a specific niche without a close alternative. If your business will stand out, you must go the extra mile in ensuring customer satisfaction through customer-focused blogging to increase the retention rate. When you make it a priority to delight your prospects, you boost the chances of having them become loyal to your brand.

3. Saves cost

Customer-focused blogging helps you cut costs, especially if you’re considering gaining long-term results for your business. Since this approach emphasizes understanding your customer’s needs before creating content, it will help you increase the likelihood of gaining organic traffic to your website without paid advertising.

4. Endangers growth

When a business can build a solid reputation that shows they genuinely care about its customers, growth is inevitable. Customer-focused blogging helps create some buzz around the products or services a business offers, and it suits customer needs. This perspective also provides an avenue for businesses to gain more money by satisfying search intent.

In conclusion

A website blog is a must-have for every business. However, the approach a company adopts while creating high-quality blog posts for sites also plays a vital role in determining whether you’ll fully access the benefits of blogging.

Although product-focused blogging is beneficial, your business should be customer-centric instead of shoving new features down the throat of every prospect. Focusing on your customers and solving their challenges can create opportunities for your business to produce tangible results.