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1. Hi! We’re trying to get our blog off the ground. We don’t really know what our readers want except from GA data. We were advised to perform audience research. Have you done this? Any suggestions here? I was thinking of finding blog subscribers who work in SF and taking them out for coffee or lunch.

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   1. Audience research can be a great first step indeed. I came onto the Buffer team after the blog was already a bit established, so I can’t speak with too much confidence to how it was in the early days. I will say that audience research has been valuable in a couple of ways for us as we’ve continued to grow and learn. Specifically:

      > We get great ideas via customer support and social media engagement. We can learn a bit about which content resonates with the audience and which problems they’d like help with by studying the types of questions that come into HelpScout (particularly the ones where our Heroes don’t have a blog post to share with the customer for an answer) and by noticing the topics that get the most clicks, shares, etc. when shared to social.

      > We also gained a good deal of insight from a reader survey that we emailed to an engaged segment of our RSS list. Here’s the survey and the questions. Feel free to copy all this if you think it might be helpful. :)

      There’s also this really amazing blog post I read recently from Anam Hussein (from Sidekick/HubSpot) that touches on the strategy to build a blog. The audience insight part really stood out to me:

      > Contact at least 10 people in your target audience. This can be done by pulling current users in your database or even just searching LinkedIn for people with job titles that match your desired customer.
      > Schedule 1-hour interviews.
      > Ask them five sets of questions:

      1. Find out who they are: Company name? Age? How long have they been in their current role? how large is their team? Why do they do what they do?
      2. Find out what they do: What motivates them? What is the end game for them? What are their aspirations? Why did they change from company A to company B?
      3. Find out what they want: What are their hopes and dreams? What content are they attracted to or read now?
      4. Find out how they see themselves: How do they compare themselves to co-workers? Do they think there’s more to learn about their profession? Do they hangout their co-workers outside of work?
      5. Find out how they spend their day-to-day: What do they read? What do they share? How do they learn about new stuff? New articles? What do they hate about their day? What do they love?

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