Blogging offers a powerful jolt to an online marketing strategy. That’s because with blogging you can bring customers directly to your site. Your website becomes more than a selling tool when you add a blog because it now generates valuable traffic and leads.
Blogs can help with serving prospective clients, existing customers and even your staff. But to blog effectively, you’ll need a strong corporate blog strategy. Here’s a guide to winning with your corporate blog.
What Value Does a Corporate Blog Offer?
Updating your blog is a crucial aspect of any SEO or content marketing strategy. When you use a blog, you can experience increased ROI, larger traffic volumes and improved conversion rates.
Here’s what research shows about the effectiveness of blog strategies:
- Maintaining a blog generally results in a 434 percent increase in indexed pages
- When you blog, you can see as much as 67 percent more monthly leads
- Blogging businesses get 55 percent more website visitors than those that do not
- Websites that have a blog often see 67 percent more leads each month compared to companies that don’t have a blog
But to see these results, you’ll need to build an effective blogging strategy and stick with your posting schedule, which is more challenging than you might think. Content production is time-consuming. And you’ll need to dedicate resources to coming up with topic ideas that will resonate with your target audience and answer their questions. That way, you see both search engine rankings and customer engagement.
Blogging Benefits
Blogs are there to answer customer questions long before a customer would feel comfortable reaching out to you. Blogging benefits are numerous, including:
- Drives traffic to your website
- Offers content you can use for other avenues, such as social media
- Can help in converting website traffic into leads
- Powers long-term results
- Is good for link building
- Helps with getting company news in the public eye
- Can be good for testing campaigns or messaging tactics for less
In modern marketing, you can’t build a complete content marketing plan without blogging. It gives you a great excuse to reach out to your client list or prospective client list to share something new that they might not know to stay in touch and remain top of mind.
Search engines also like seeing websites that are updated regularly. This helps in increasing your domain authority, making you more likely to rank for future keywords.
Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Corporate Blog Strategy
Now that you have a better concept of what a corporate blog is and what it can offer your business, here’s how to build a winning blog strategy that helps you achieve your goals.
1. Outline the Blog’s Purpose
The first step in building a winning blog strategy is to outline why you even have a blog. This will also help you decide what topics your blog covers. You should be able to summarize the purpose of your blog in a sentence or two. Some examples of your blog’s purpose might include:
- To inform or educate readers
- Tell your brand story to guide customers toward a purchasing decision
- Share the benefits and use cases of your product or service
This will guide you to better meet your target audience’s needs and understand what is bringing them to your blog in the first place.
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2. Define Your Target Audience
Now that you know why your blog exists and the purpose it fulfills, you need to define your target audience. Without target demographics, your blog content might be all over the place and miss the mark in accomplishing your goals.
All blog articles should have a specific audience in mind. This might be a pre-defined buyer persona or fit within one of your market niches. It’s up to you how to target each post. Perhaps various categories will service different audience segments.
Good things to consider when defining your target audience include:
- Pain points
- Challenges
- Gaps in knowledge
- Where your audience consumes content (i.e., blogs, videos, preferred social media channels, etc.)
- The most valuable format for content based on your audience, such as a guide, whitepaper, reviews, news
- What signs can you use to see if the content is resonating with your audience, such as comments, purchases, email signups, ROI
3. How Often Will You Publish Content
You’ll want to outline how often you’ll publish new content to ensure consistency and allow your users to learn when to expect new content from you. As you consider this, make sure it’s a schedule you can sustain while still providing high-quality content to your readers.
While considering how often to publish, also consider what format this content will be in, such as video, guide, whitepaper, etc. A strong content calendar will be an important part of your success.
You’ll also want to review your resources, including budget and staff, to see how often it is realistic for you to publish content.
4. Create a Plan for Coming Up with Blog Topics
Who will create your new blog topics? How will you keep track of new ideas that other departments and leadership members come up with?
One helpful place where you’ll find new topic ideas is customer service. If the team is seeing recurring questions related to a product or service or hearing anecdotally about an issue, this is an opportunity to clear things up and allow your customers to find answers independently.
You’ll also want to watch what your competitors are doing and complete competitive keyword research. But realize that you can’t just publish the same blogs as what your competition is writing. Unique content is important and will help you win new customers. But you can look at your competitors for inspiration at times.
5. Set Goals and KPIs for Your Blog
How will you know if your blogging strategy is working? You need to outline what success looks like for your blog before you get started so that you can recognize that success once you start reviewing metrics.
These goals might slowly increase with time, or you might review them annually to look for opportunities for ongoing growth.
6. Begin Producing Content
You can’t stay in the planning phase forever. At some point, you need to shift to executing the strategy. Begin publishing content based on the content calendar you’ve created. Start taking notes about what’s working well in content creation and what needs some work.
While producing new content, make sure you’re also sharing it on other marketing channels. Social media is a great place to share and reshare this content. You might also consider sending the content to major industry publications for backlinking.
If creating a corporate blogging strategy is overwhelming or you aren’t sure where to get started, schedule a free consultation with New Light Digital. Our team of experts is ready to help you build a strategy that works for both SEO and acquiring new customers.
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