How to Blog like a Business
Cocoonfxmedia Ltd
As a marketing tactic often overlooked by businesses, blogging can be a surprisingly effective tool for raising awareness of your brand and generating interest in your products and services.
Not only will a useful and interesting blog draw more people to your website, but it will also establish your business as an authority in your field; building trust and reassuring readers that it’s okay to take the next step towards becoming loyal customers.
Blogging may just be written content and images that provide useful information on a particular subject, but many businesses find it difficult to know where to start, how to blog and what needs to be done to make blogging an effective marketing tool.
So, what are the steps that can help your blog bring in big business?
The Business of Blogging and How to Do It…
Step 1: Create Your Blogging Space
Choosing where to create your blog is an important strategy that assists customers to seamlessly transition from your blog to other sections of your website, allowing them to easily learn more about your products and services.
That’s why it makes sense to incorporate a blog section within your business website and not on a separate blogging platform.
Adding an area on your website formatted specifically for blogs also has the added benefits of increasing visibility of your business in search engines (such as Google). It’s also easier to promote your brand as your website domain name and business name is advertised each time the blog is visited and shared.
Step 2: Decide What to Blog About
Business blogs are different from personal blogs in that they are not overly informal, personal or controversial; but business blogging is a marketing tool that focuses strongly on the audience needs, addresses their concerns and subtly highlights benefits of your business.
Therefore, you don’t want to fall into the trap of spouting sales messages – the idea here is to build trust, and direct customers to helpful solutions…as well as selecting a topic that relates to your services and that your audience will actually want to read.
So, what should you write about? What do your potential customers want to know or understand better? How can you alleviate their concerns or answer their questions? Here are some ways you can gain inspiration:
- Create or review your customer persona – what is their demographic? Which goals or challenges do they have?
- Conduct a customer satisfaction survey
- Identify your most popular website pages (which you can do through Google Analytics) to find out which product or service your visitors want to know more about.
- Search your emails or ask colleagues to find out which questions are most popular when speaking with clients or customers.
- Have a look through your complaints and complements logs to address concerns.
- Browse your social media platforms – look to see what your customers are talking about, what comments they leave under your posts and which of your posts are shared more than others.
- Subscribe to popular industry magazines that link to your sector. This can help you discover related subjects that are of interest to your customers.
- Revisit successful projects and write about how your business overcame obstacles (you can also use these to create case studies).
- Ask an already established blogger to write a review in return for a free product or service.
- Explain market research or surveys that has recently been undertaken
- Consider writing how-to guides, beginners guides, common mistakes and handy tips blogs.
Step 3: Write Your Business Blog like a Pro
Whether you choose to write the business blog yourself, delegate it to an employee or a marketing professional – your blog content should always be easily understandable, accurate and useful (both to your objectives and the readers).
A good way to achieve this is to use CRABS. Well, not literally. But as a mnemonic to remember to write your blogs in the following way; chunky [in short paragraphs], relevant, accurate, brief and scannable.
Before writing your business blog, it also helps to consider which keywords to include. These are the words or phrases often used in search engines to locate information and answers to questions… such as “how to write a business blog.” (Which of course is a completely random phrase and not at all related to increasing the keywords of this particular blog).
When writing your blog, remain aware of these keywords and how they can naturally be fitted into your blog; assisting search engines to identify the topic and present it as relevant for searchers.
As well as keywords, it’s also helpful to add links in the business blog to areas of your website that can allow the reader to learn more about your service or product, helping to educate them further and funnel them towards a desired action or goal.
Another important aspect for blogging is tone of voice. Blogs are generally informal and written in the first-person tone. So, remember to ditch the dry corporate lecture and lean towards a conversational, lighter tone of voice that speaks with the reader, rather than at the reader.
And last, but by no means least, don’t forget to grammar and spell check to really nail down your authority as a professional business.
Step 4: Just Keep Blogging
It can take a bit of time to build up a reputation as a valuable source and authority in your field – and of course, 1 or 2 blogs every few months just isn’t going to cut it.
So, with business blogging, it’s very important to upload blogs regularly each month. This will not only inform search engines that your website is active leading to higher rankings, but it also ensures a steady flow of visitors and dispels the opinion that your business has become stagnated… or dormant.
To help you achieve this, why not create an editorial calendar. This is simply a schedule that determines when you will write your blogs, what you will write about and when to promote them.
This will help you stay on schedule as well as identify holidays and events that you can include in your blogs.
Step 5: Promote and Monitor
And finally, the pièce de résistance – promoting your blog.
The great thing about your new business blog, is that it helps to open up new avenues of marketing.
No longer do you have to wait for readers to come to your website, now you can inform them that relevant and helpful information is awaiting them through a number of ways:
- Email marketing: By including a sign-up option on your blog page, interested readers can receive notifications that a new blog has been published (and allows you opportunity to drop in a marketing message… or two).
- Social media marketing: Blogs give us businesses a great reason to post on social media. By posting about new and uploaded blogs, you can keep your business social media profiles fresh and appealing. This also has the added benefit of advocacy; whereby interested parties can share your posts with others and help to expand your reach.
- Paid Promotion: Are you planning a blog which you consider especially valuable for customers or for your business opportunities? One way to boost visibility is by paying for ads that appear to a specific demographic through search engine advertising or social media advertising.
Once you’ve written, uploaded and promoted your blog, don’t forget to monitor the effectiveness of each blog. After all, the end game is to gain a good return on your investment and the more information you can gain about your customer preferences, the more you can meet their needs and gain the edge on the competition.
With business blogs, it pays to use analytic tools to monitor customer interactions such as:
- Number of visitors
- Duration of visit
- Most popular blogs / least popular blogs
- Links clicked / web pages visited after the blog
- Referral sites (are they visiting from search engines or social media?)
- Trends for visiting (time, days)
- New vs Returning visitors
- Comments left on blog posts
With this data capture, you should be able to build up a picture of what your visitors are doing once they get to your website and what they really want. If your blogs are performing well, you should see an increase in website visits, contacts and your bottom line.
So there you have it.
Your start to a cost-effective business boost by using blogs.
Of course, blogging has many aspects and requires a decent amount of dedication and time commitment. Which some businesses assign to expert digital marketers.
But the efforts of business blogging are worth it. In fact, it’s claimed that companies that prioritise blogging are 13 times more likely to enjoy an increase in their return on investment.
Although business blogs are often neglected, statistics are proving that blogs for both B2B and B2C companies can be effective, with each individual blog continuing to bring in website traffic for years to come.
So ask yourself – what’s holding you back?
Now’s the time to start your business blog, explore your opportunities and expand your potential.
Blog by James Blackman
Managing Partner