Blog Topics: “What Does It Mean to Joe Sixpack?”

Early in my career I worked in local television news. While I didn’t know it at the time, it was a great experience that taught me some very valuable lessons that I still carry with me. Most of them came from my news director. He was a man who used a few colorful sayings to emphasize some really important points.

For example: “There’s no magic wand in TV news.” He was referring to the idea that the work didn’t just happen. You had to pay attention to the details and make sure you got them right. 

Another saying was, “Localize your story. What does it mean to Joe Sixpack sitting at home.” In other words, he wanted us to tie our news stories to the lives of our viewers and answer the questions, “How does it impact them?” and “Why should thy care?” 

Put another way, he wanted us to make the story relevant to their lives. This idea of relevance has stayed with me throughout my professional career. It is an important concept when it comes to marketing.

Make Your Blog Topics Relevant

One of the main challenges that marketers face today is getting traffic to their business website. A blog can help with this. When searched, the topics can appear in the search results. But to get searchers to click on your website, the blog topics must resonate with them. They have to feel some connection. It has to mean something to them.

Just as my former news director asked us, “What does it mean to Joe Sixpack sitting at home?” we as marketers should ask ourselves, “What does this topic mean to our target market?” Is it something they care about? Does it provide an answer or a solution for which they are looking? If you can’t answer these questions clearly, perhaps it’s not the right topic.

So when creating content for your blog, your topics need to connect in some way to your target audience. If you want people to be attracted to it, click on the link and read it, the topic needs to be something they care about or some answer they are trying to find.

Selling Lawn Mowers

Consider the example of a business that sells lawn mowers. The owner wants to attract traffic to his site through search, so he decides to write about things that homeowners who own lawn mowers might care about. The content categories he decides to write about include lawn care tips, landscaping tips and lawn mower maintenance tips. 

These are all subjects that a homeowner would have questions about at one time or another. Upon arriving at the blog through an online search, the homeowner discovers that this business also sells lawn mowers. While not every homeowner who reads his blog articles is in the market for a lawn mower, this particular business has made a positive impression on those who are.

The Wrap

Connecting with your target market is crucial if you want to win them over and convert them to customers. If you’re using content marketing to do that, you need to create content that they will care about. It’s a must. 

Remember, before you create content, ask yourself, “What does it mean to Joe Sixpack?” If you have questions about creating relevant blog topics, call me at 513-237-5530.

______________________________________________________________________

Bob Turner is a Digital Marketing Consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio.