As a successful business, you understand your customer.

Most businesses have a defined profile of their ideal customer. These profiles are great to have for everyone in the business.

From the CEO to the secretary, the customer profile is something that allows a business to serve the customer. With a full profile of the customer, it’s easy to understand who that person is and what their needs, wants and dreams are.

The same concept is important with a blogging strategy.

It’s necessary to understand the person that is reading your blog and figure out if this is the person you are targeting with your business.

Identifying Blog Readers

A favorite writer and business mind of mine is Kevin Hillstrom of Mine That Data.

Kevin writes about many great topics concerning business. His insight into merchandise and customer profiles is some of the best I’ve seen. Follow and subscribe to his content if you do not already.

Recently, Kevin has been discussing three different customer profiles.

From Dear Catalog CEOs: Newspapers, Music, and Catalogs:

I created the “Traditional”, “Transitional”, and “Transformational” framework to help us adapt to the world as it exists. Think about newspapers, for instance.

• A Traditional customer gets the news via print, and happily pays to maintain the distribution channel that served him for the past thirty or forty years.
• A Transitional customer browses media online, “mashing up” a personalized news reader (Google Reader or Twitter) or leveraging the Huffington Post or Drudge Report, as examples.
• A Transformational customer might use Flipboard to consume information and links published by trusted friends, and won’t ever pay the NY Times for digital content, in fact, this user finds the NY Times to be largely irrelevant.

The Transitional / Transformational customer aren’t going back to a print-based newspaper.

This is great insight into the person that is reading your company blog.

Your Blog Readers

The majority of your blog readers are transformational customers.

Another percentage of the readership will be transitional customers.

The combination of these two groups are familiar with reading blogs. These folks consume content via their computers, mobiles and tablets. They have migrated from using printed material to using digital material and they are accustom to reading blogs. These people are part of online communities. They use search engines to find content. They use social communities to find content.

This group of people are typically under 40 years old. The age and other demographics can skew a little, but for the most part they are of the younger generation that grew up with the Internet as the main source of information.

Understanding that this is the blog reader profile is important for your company’s blog initiative.

If the target customer at your business is a traditional customer you are probably not going to have success with a company blog. It’s possible, but there are likely other low cost customer acquisition methods.

Your business needs to be at least targeting transitional customers. If this is the case you have a chance to succeed with a company blog strategy.

It would be even better if your target audience was transformational customers. This group of folks consume their information with digital channels and know how to find blog content. This group of people typically likes blog content and responds to it and connects with strong offers of products and services offered by blogging companies.

Not every company has a target customer that reads blogs.

Determine if your business does and make your blogging decision at that point.

It could save your company time and money.

iPad Reader image courtesy of Christian Steen