Can you count the number of new subscribers you have got to your blogs, this year, on one hand? Or can you count them on one finger?
If this is the case, don’t worry; you are not alone!
A fresh approach to newsletters
OK, I’m going, to be honest, our old newsletter sucked! I wouldn't have even subscribed to it myself, and most of the articles were written by me!
If it was that bad, why did we do it?
Well, everyone else does it, so surely we should do it too? Or so we thought.
Week by week we tried to produce lines of content about how great we are, or the wonderful work we're doing.
The problem is, posting content like this, is a massive waste of resource and time.
So how do you go about it?
I recently spoke to a client, where two of them were spending a couple of days each month, producing a newsletter, only to see a couple of clicks as a result.
When I said to then 'stop'; you could see the relief across their faces.
It's not just them. I would have bet, if you looked at 10 sites at least half (if not more) would be producing blogs and newsletters all about themselves; the awards they have won, the services they offer, their new members of staff, their latest charity campaign, etc.
Look, these do have their place, but you can’t fill your whole blog or newsletter with content that just talks about you.
Why? Well, your potential customer just couldn’t care less.
This sort of content is not giving them anything useful. It's not helpful and valuable to them.
Remember, it's not about you - it's about them!
We, like most other companies, we're just not focusing on the needs of our customers, and therefore our buyer personas. In fact, I don’t even think we had nailed a single buyer persona down.
How could we write targeted content for our audience, if we didn’t know who we were writing for and what their problems were?
Helpful blogs that people want to read
"OK James, so how do we go about getting more subscribers now?" I hear you all cry!
As I have alluded, we started by producing our first, main buyer persona.
Say hello therefore, to our imaginary marketing manager, 'Mike Marketing' (it could by the way, just have easily been Melanie Marketing!).
This might even be you.
We spent time getting under 'Mike's' skin, really getting to know him and really understanding the problems he faces.
Once we knew what Mike's challenges were, we could then start to think about the content that would help him solve these problems.
The content didn’t stop at blog posts; we also started to create lead generators (check out for example, our helpful e-book on Inbound Marketing Essentials).
Lead generators/ e-books are chunkier and we knew these would have a strong pull for 'Mike'. They would therefore encourage him to fill out a form to download this useful content for free.
Once we started to create good quality targeted content that our buyer persona wanted to read (we were now solving 'Mike's' problems and helping him succeed in his job), the subscriptions started to really improve.
Share your expertise and win business!
Once we stopped talking about and pushing our services and instead, we started to listen to and help our prospects by delivering brilliant content they would appreciate and benefit from - things seriously changed.
Method's ethos has always been to help, it's at the core of what we do, but our blogs just didn't do that.
Well, we've changed and evolved - and we've come out much stronger on the other side.
In short, our advice is; scrap your traditional, 'this is what we do/ this is what we did' newsletters and instead, start helping your potential prospects with some content they'll really appreciate!
To find out more about how we do it, why not Download our e-book for more tips and strategies on better lead generation ?
