Who is your collaborative space blog for, anyway?

Do you have a blog for your collaborative space? How’s it looking? Outstanding or a little lackluster. If you’re not seeing the engagement you’d like from your blog and content marketing efforts, you may need to better define who it is you’re creating content for.

If you try to reach everyone with your content, you’ll end up reaching no one. Imagine that you’re craving Thai food and you’re trying to decide on a restaurant.

One friend says he knows of a place that has all kinds of food, from pizza and burgers to salads, burritos and Thai food. Another friend suggests a small Thai joint near her house that has the best green curry in town.

Which one sounds like the better bet for Thai food? Not the place that serves up everything, right? You’d much rather get Thai food from people who focus, exclusively, on Thai food.

So it goes with your blog. Don’t try to reach everyone. Doing so waters down your story and makes you a bland option for everyone, rather than the top option for your target customer.

Don’t be afraid to niche down to exactly who you’re trying to reach rather than casting a wide net and hoping to catch a few leads among a sea of people not interested in what you’re doing.

Decide who you’d like to reach. Are you trying to attract new members? Are you providing resources and tips for existing members to strengthen the community? Are you sharing insights about running a collaborative organization with other collaborative space operators? Know who it is you’re targeting and speak directly to them.

You can have more than one target audience or customer persona, and yes, audiences can overlap. But you want to maintain consistency so that someone who ends up on your blog to read about productivity apps for solopreneurs doesn’t then quickly click away if the next post is an industry insider post about software for managing member sign-ups.

It’s tempting to want to throw a bunch of posts at your blog to see what sticks, and, in the early days of your blog, you may need to do some of that. But the quicker and more tightly you define your audience, the better off your overall content strategy—and marketing, in general—will be.

Let me know if you have any questions. I’m happy to share more insights and tips.

Free guide: There are fantastic tools to help you create a content strategy, find great content ideas, and stay on-track with your content goals. I rounded up a few of my favorites. Get the free one-page guide: 4 Free Content Tools for Collaborative Space Operators