5 Tips to Find Your Footing and Create a Successful Company Blog
Have you been considering starting a blog for your company? If yes, then you are about to make one of the best decisions for the future of your business. According to the study, people tend to connect more with organizations that offer them meaningful and top quality content. And what’s a better way to do this if not through an active company blog?
Moreover, even for online stores, becoming successful is not a piece of cake unless they too are publishing blog posts on their website. Why? Because if there is no content for the people to read, they don’t actually have any reason to stay on your website unless, of course, they are there to make a purchase especially. To put it another way, without posts to read, you won’t receive much traffic and engagement from site visitors.
That is to say, if you are thinking about starting a company blog, you should definitely go ahead without a second thought, and in case you don’t have any such plans, it’s time to rethink it. Nevertheless, content creation and marketing is not an overnight job. It will require your time, effort, and resources to achieve your goals. If you feel uncertain about how you should start this new journey, check out these tips to help you discover your footing, and make your blog successful.
- Know Your Target Audience
Before you begin brainstorming titles and headings for your content or working on the design of your blog, because let’s face the truth – what is the point of having a website if it does not receive any visitors – pretty much useless, isn’t it? So, the first logical step is to get to know the audience that will ultimately read your content.
Another great way to understand your target audience is by assessing your on-site analytics, going through your feedback on different social media channels, and also checking out the blogs of your direct competitors.
Build personas for your target audience with the help of this information. It is quite common for businesses to have more than five target audience personas, and this applies to startups too. Creating these profiles comes down to the needs of your target audience. Formulate their needs by using their goals as well as pain points and then add audience demographics to get more specific with your audit.
- Establish Your Brand Voice
Let’s discuss your brand voice now. Contemplate the blog posts you often find yourself reading at least every week. What do these blogs have in common? The chances are that they have a unique brand voice that helps them send their message across in a distinct manner that distinguishes them from all the others in the industry.
Now, it is your responsibility to make your audience feel the same way about your brand. An excellent way to establish your brand voice is to make use of your target audience personas and find out what voice tone would go well with your target demographics. For example, suppose your audience comprises customers who are in their late fifties; you would most probably want to refrain from using slang and informal words.
Likewise, if your crowd consists of young adults who are between 18-25 years, you can genuinely expect to see substantial engagement by peppering your writing with humor and utilizing visual humor elements such as memes and GIFs.
You should try and establish your brand as early as possible so that the audience knows what to expect when they read your blog posts. Remember, it’s all cool if you decide to make some modifications in your voice tone and presentation in the course of time. However, setting out with a consistent brand voice is the quickest way to build a loyal audience that engages with your brand consistently.
- Put Out Data-Driven Content
Putting out data-driven content puts your company at a much better position to set up a successful blog. However, that does not mean you can’t use your own personality and post opinion content pieces from time to time. But data-driven content is a vital factor that distinguishes decent content from the best ones.
One of the primary reasons why people love reading blog posts is that it educates them on a specific topic and thus helps them improve their skills at the same time. When you include data within your content, it helps with both these factors as the content will teach them and also present them with actual figures that they can take advantage of while pursuing their goals or conquering some industry problems.
There are numerous types of data-driven content that you can post on your company blog. For example, SaaS businesses and eCommerce storefronts can reap benefits by publishing statistics-based content and case studies on their blog.
Nevertheless, in order to put out data-driven content, you will be required to do additional research compared to other content types, but the payoff is what makes it worth all the efforts. Consider topics you can write content about that have lesser-known or intriguing data and prioritize those topics when you begin posting content to your company blog.
- Encourage User Engagement
It is not uncommon to see lots of businesses struggling to get their target audience to engage with their blog content frequently. Hence, they end up quitting on their blogging efforts and, resultantly, missing out on all the incredible benefits of having a powerful content marketing strategy.
If you want users to stay on your website and engage with your content often, you need to present them with multiple options to engage. There are heaps of engagement options that you can include within your blog. For example, you can add a comments section at the end of your blog posts, to begin with. Suppose a visitor reads a post on your website and wishes to ask a question or maybe initiate a discussion; the presence of a comments section will provide them with the opportunity to do so.
As soon as a few readers start putting their opinions forward, other readers too will feel motivated to do so. Before you know it, there will be bulks of readers discussing your blog posts while still being on your website. But that’s not all. Such conversations tend to draw readers back to your site to read what other users have said over time, thus further contributing towards driving more traffic and user engagement to your site.
Keep in mind that we are living in a world of social media. Therefore we suggest you make your content easily shareable on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. These social networking sites enjoy hundreds of millions of active users per day so, by making it easy for users to share your content, you can spark interest in more people and get them to engage with your content too.
It’s up to you whether you decide to integrate your social media feed to your website directly or simply add share icons that visitors can click on to repost your content on their social media handles.
- Analyze Your Results
Last but not least, once you have successfully created your company blog, it is crucial for you to realize that content marketing is a never-ending process. Our last tip is that you track your content performance and results of your posts as well as sales campaigns within particular posts regularly.
Conducting a content audit every quarter can help you find out what type of content is working well for your business and what needs to be improved. When evaluating your blog posts’ success, consider everything, including views, conversions, bounce rates, and user engagement. While auditing, you will get to learn a lot from both – your best-performing posts as well as the ones receiving little to no engagement.
Wrapping It Up
To summarize, blogging is one of the fastest and easiest (and cheapest) ways to expand your audience and grow brand awareness. Blogging frequently puts you in front of the people, and the quality of your posts determines how effectively you can filter out and drive your target customers to your website.
Businesses should undoubtedly have an active blog on their website to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions. If you are just starting out with your blogging journey, these five tips will come in handy. Implement these within your content strategy, and before long, you will discover your footing and boast a dramatically successful company blog.
Happy blogging!