Write about your customers, not your products

I spoke the other day to a group about social & conversational media, and how to leverage simple strategies with blogs, social networks and the like to generate interest, awareness and sales for any product, service or brand.

An executive from a print services company at the event was convinced that nobody would care to read a blog about printers and print services. And I agreed with him.

Don’t write about your products. Write about your customers.

Your customers don’t buy printers because they want printers. If you know why they’re buying printers (in other words, how they’re using those printers), you can write about THAT. It gives you infinitely more subject matter to write about, especially in formats that lend themselves to progressive, serialized or community-contributed content.

Let’s say you’re trying to sell printers to amateur photographers. How can you teach photographers how to best user home printers to create professional-looking prints? Can you help those same photographers discover inexpensive, downloadable software to make their photos look even better before printing? How about helping them share their photos with friends & family, or with other networks of photographers?

Give your customers some information to chew on, then ask what other resources they know about. Your content will be a starting point for more, user-generated content that not only enhances your original content, but will give you suggestions for future content, marketing ideas, product suggestions and more.

All of these topics, and dozens more, and far more interesting to your customers. And every single one will lead to them thinking about printers.