You hear business owners say things like this all the time:
“I am my market”
Sigh…
If there’s one thing I wish people would understand (well, that particular list has about a zillion items on it, but whatever) it’s that you most definitely are not your market. The reasons are simple but apparently not very obvious, or fewer business bloggers would make this critical mistake.
There are two very important reasons why you are not your market:
- You’re running your own business. Most people are not. Probably your customers are not, which means you are not like them in significant, fundamental ways. Of course, your customers may be other business owners, and that can pull you a little closer together, but even so, the next point will always be true.
- You are an expert at something your customers are not. Therefor you are not like them. The difference is astounding. In my business of blog consulting, for example, I deal with clients who often know very little about what they’re getting into. They’re not like me at all! If they were, they wouldn’t need to hire me. I’m sure my auto mechanic or accountant must have thought some of the things I’ve said to them must have sounded pretty ignorant.
Let’s flip the roles around. Think about someone you pay because they perform a service for you that you can’t do: building contractor, web designer, lawyer, retail psychologist, cool hunter, whatever. Can you honestly look at them and think to yourself, Yeah, I am very much like that person, I am their market.
I didn’t think so.
Okay, I’ve made my point. Why does this matter? Well, in a larger sense, it matters to everything you do as you engage with your customers and plan your business activities at a high level. Not like that’s important, or anything. 
But here’s how it matters to business blogging: it points out that you need a way to break out of this thinking so you can really understand your customer.
The whole point of really knowing who your customers are is so that you know exactly what to say to them on your blog in posts and in comments. This means your blogging has a higher ROTI and general ROI. This makes business blogging worth your time because the payoff directly feeds your bottom line: you form stronger relationships with customers and that investment pays for itself a million times over in a million ways.
That’s why we’re so bullish on personas. We keep hammering this point because it’s so foundational to everything else we’re going to put into Gateway Blogging.
