SpareFoot looks like a pretty neat company with a simple, but needed product.
It seems like most people have the need for more space. We all have our collections of stuff and we often run out of places to put it all.
Or some folks get ready to move and during the move there can be a period when things are in limbo and there is a need to store things…a lot of things and that’s obviously an issue unless you have a place to store it all.
SpareFoot is a solution to find the best option for your storage needs. It looks easy to use and they’re getting some great buzz and I thought we could check out what they’re doing to attract their target audience (people that need to store things) with a blog on their website.
So let’s get into it…
1. Full Commitment
Just looking at the main archive page or blog page on SpareFoot makes me smile. It makes me smile because they are fully committed to blogging and using the blog to attract their target customers.
This has been a theme in the Blog Analysis series. It’s common to see businesses get excited about the possibility of starting a blog. Maybe they see a competitor or complementary business with a successful blog so they start one of their own.
That’s great, but the expectations can get out of whack with blogging. It takes a long time to succeed with it. We’re talking years. That’s a challenge for some, but that also presents an opportunity.
The companies that stick with it, like it seems SpareFoot is doing, are the ones that succeed while the ones that give up never see the same results.
2. Categories
On the right hand side a little ways down on the blog page on SpareFoot you’ll see that they have a long list of categories. What I like to see is that on the main page they have about four main categories that they promote a little more:
- How to
- Home organization
- Fun uses
- Storage auction
- Storage news
These are great categories for a company blog like SpareFoot. They’re focusing on the topics that their target customers are going to have questions about.
When you’re starting a business blog it’s a good idea to create a set of categories. You could have anywhere from maybe 3-7 categories. That’s about the norm.
3. Questions The Audience Is Asking
Building on the last item is the idea of what you can write about with a business blog.
My general rule of thumb is that you want to answer the questions your target reader or customer is asking.
If you’re a B2B, you want to focus mostly on the questions your customer is asking in relation to their work. If you’re B2C, you want to focus mostly on the questions your customer is asking in relation to their life.
Here’s a good post on SpareFoot’s blog post about the best cities for people with university educations and degrees. You might wonder why SpareFoot, a storage company, would be writing about this, but remember that they’re target customer is often a person on the move. They need to store things because they’re in the process of moving and a good number of those are probably recent grads.
So a post like this makes sense especially the people asking the question about where they should live.
4. Fun Posts
We saw earlier that SpareFoot has a category for fun posts and things that are fun. They certainly have some great how-to content that shows people how to do things and provides some great tips, but it is also great when a company can show a little personality by making people laugh a little.
So this post is great. I love it. It’s a great list post. The ideas are all about the events or situations you get into when you’re moving. It takes effort just to create the list, but then SpareFoot took it to another level with the GIFs.
I love the one with Ross from Friends. If you’ve ever moved with your friends and family then you have probably been in this situation.
5. Cross-Promoting
In this context I mean that you’re taking different marketing efforts and channels and kind of cross-promoting. In this case we have a post where SpareFoot is sharing some videos they’re doing on YouTube.
If you’re doing things with video, Instagram, Facebook, email or whatever it’s a good idea to cross-promote on all your channels. It’s good especially in the early days to kind of build the audience if you’re doing something new.
In this case the blog is established and they’re starting a new video series so they’re letting the blog audience know about the video series.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of good going on with the SpareFoot blog. There are so many great posts on the blog and they have it organized well. And I love that they’re publishing multiple times per week. Over time that will build and build and their blog and website will have some great authority. It will help them bring in traffic from various channels including search and social. And that’s usually one of the big goals for companies with a website. And blogging is a great way to bring that traffic in.