One way to prove your industry chops is to relate your insight and expertise to trends and timely news events on the company blog.
Publishing content on a regular basis is crucial, but blogging every week doesn’t guarantee success—especially if you haven’t defined what that success looks like. Establish a clear purpose and ensure all your contributors are mindful of it. Share your ideas with the rest of your teams (e.g. the social, new business and PR teams) to fully integrate them into the plan.
How do you know what the blog’s purpose should be? Think about your business goals and decide how the blog can enhance your strategy. For example, is there a particular service offering that you want to promote? Are you trying to reach a new market? Make it part of your content campaign and write about relevant topics.
You can use the company blog as a convenient platform for getting in front of your current and potential customers. Here are some tips to get you going:
Write with a campaign and buyer persona in mind.
It’s easy to write about topics that you’re passionate about, but it’s also easy to lose sight of the task at hand. Avoid going rogue and follow a pre-planned content calendar that focuses on a campaign theme. The specific blog topics can take various angles, but they should all be tailored to the buyer personas you’re targeting. A buyer persona is, in simple terms, an idealized version of one of your customer segments (e.g. marketing directors and CEOs).
Include supplemental content offerings in blog posts.
The blog is a valuable resource to use as fodder for social posts, as story ideas for pitching media and in content marketing endeavors like social advertising and email campaigns. If the mission of the blog is to attract new business leads, go deep into a topic by linking to e-books, videos, infographics and more. Continue to pique your readers’ interest by sharing information that is meaningful to them and their businesses.
Track metrics based your blog’s purpose.
Your blog’s metrics will give you important insight into how well it’s doing. Google Analytics and your CRM platform are good places to start. Weigh certain data more heavily depending on what you’re trying to achieve, but be careful not to take it all at face value. A post may have 60 views, but it doesn’t mean all are noteworthy. Dig deeper to uncover what your most read blogs are, who is reading them, how often they return and how they found the blog. For instance, you might discover that most people find your blog via links in social media posts rather than going to the website. Knowing these facts will help guide how you promote the blog and what topics you focus on.