Having a blog for your business used to be a "nice to have"—great if you needed a project for your summer intern, or a centralized location for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) boosting content. Today, blogs are practically required in companies that take their marketing seriously, and for good reason—they are a relatively inexpensive yet highly effective investment of your time and money.
If well-written, a relevant blog can have a huge impact on your reputation in your industry and your ability to connect with your customer base. It also affects your company's profitability – according to InsideView, companies with an ACTIVE blog generate 67% more sales leads per month.
That said, as blogs have become more common, "bar blogging" has definitely emerged. It's no longer enough to just have a blog for press purposes or mere presence. Your audience expects more. Much more. So, if you're hesitant to launch your company blog – or you've already launched one but it needs a little love – here's a 3-step guide to help you:
1. Establish a schedule that you can stick to.
You know the old saying – “The best exercise program is the one you’re actually going to do?” Don’t make a big commitment to your blog before you’ve written a single post. Start small – you don’t have to post every day. The most important thing is to be consistent. If you find that a few posts a week is easy to do, you can gradually increase the frequency until you get into the habit.
To ensure consistent output from your blog, it's important to establish who will be responsible for its maintenance. Here at Soluções, the blog falls under the content marketing function; other companies consider the blog to be an HR function (right?). But, regardless of what or who technically "owns" the blog, you should encourage your entire company to think of the blog as their own. After all, the blog is the voice of your company – and not just a voice of your company.
[info]TIP: Create an internal blogging program to encourage everyone in your company to contribute. Here at the company, we operate under the theory that nobody knows more about the implementation than our consultants, for example.[/info]
2. Find something to write about.
I can't continue writing here without saying that your blog isn't purely a place to launch your newest product or talk about your company's latest achievements. I mean, you can certainly do it that way – but good luck getting readers (besides your boss's mother and aunt).
One of the strategies we use is the rule. 4-1-1 For example: we create at least four pieces of educational/entertaining content and one piece of "mid-stage" content (partially promotional and partially educational) for each piece of promotional content. On this blog, however, it's more like the rule... 10-1-1 which is that they almost never run any promotional content.
“But if I’m not promoting myself,” you might ask, “what should I write about?” The sweet delight of your blog content is the intersection of two groups of topics: those your company can credibly speak about to the audience, and the topics that the audience is interested in. Generate a list of your company’s “areas of expertise,” and then create a list of topics within those areas that your audience is likely concerned about.
For example, the "areas" of this blog could be: Facebook marketing, email marketing, Google marketing, content marketing, digital marketing courses, etc. This is a very broad range of knowledge, so the topics we write about are extensive.
[info]TIP: Create a blog editorial calendar, including events, holidays, international sporting events, product launches – anything you think might be relevant to your audience. This will help you brainstorm topics when you have a severe case of writer's block.[/info]
Of course, discovering which subject you'll be an authority on isn't easy; and even more so, figuring out what your audience likes isn't always so obvious. That's where the third item on the list comes in…
3. Testing and recalibration
It happens to all of us: you have a topic you're super excited to write about, and you're sure your audience will be just as excited to read it… except they're not. The upside is that, since you're measuring engagement with your blog, even those mistakes in adding a new data point for future planning are important.
Here on the blog, we look at "vanity metrics," which are nothing more than actions like likes, comments, and shares that are calculated by the bar you see on the left side of this text – which, by the way, I ask you to click on all the buttons because that's what you'd also like us to do on your blog, isn't it? So help us out too, you lovely person – but we also look at larger datasets, of course.
Using the Google Analytics, We can see which posts are the most viewed, and this allows us to know which topics our audience is most engaged with. And using our own multi-touch attribution capabilities, we can also see where our blog contributed to sales revenue – when it comes to measuring your blog's ROI (Return on Investment), it doesn't get much better than that.
[info]TIP: Try starting with a variety of topics that encompass your field, and also test different headline styles, different types of calls to action, and different ways of... Promote your blog on social media.. You might be surprised at the difference a hot hashtag or a provocative title can make.
4. Now it's your turn!
Do you already write for the company blog? Do you have a personal blog? Share it below so we can read it!
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