Businesses nowadays are looking for every competitive advantage to expand their reach and attract new customers to their offerings. There are many digital marketing methods which work to accomplish these goals, but one of the most popular and cost effective is the business blog.
Business blogs are a simple and fun way to spread the message of your brand, increase identification, and create intimacy with both your current customer base and potential customers. Writing these blogs is usually fun and exciting, but there are some fundamental principles if you want your blog to effectively engage with your base.
Here are a few tips to writing a successful and compelling business blog.
- Know your audience and address their needs
- Post frequently to keep your readers hungry for more
- Know the proper word length and style of great business blogs
Aim Your Content Toward Your Customers
Many small and large businesses alike make the mistake of hiring someone for their blog who focuses inward to find content and inspiration. While this may demonstrate effective personality for your blog, it may not attract customers. Like your website, your business blog should be up to your desired quality but it’s not actually for you to use on a daily basis.
The blog should be created to attract customers, so the employee put in charge of writing it should gear their content toward your customers and the profiles you’ve created. Every post should answer questions your customers are asking or solve problems common to those who buy your products. In addition, the greatest business blogs provide fresh and helpful insight into their industry.
Have A Content Plan
Many businesses forego a blog because they can’t come up with enough ideas to write about. While this may be a problem far down the road, the creation of a blog should automatically increase your SEO capabilities and lead to a plethora of topics instantly based on consumer needs.
If you don’t know your keywords and what your customers are searching for, find out through analytics tools. Once you know what questions your customers want answered, you’ll have the first few dozen blog topics covered for you, right then and there.
Your blogs should always be focused on your business (they are “business blogs” after all) and fill in your customers on the what and how of your industry. People read blog posts not to be sold to, but because they fill in knowledge gaps. The most stimulating, engaging blogs are those which teach the general populace something new about your business and keep their interests piqued about what you do and why you do it.
Post Frequently
Like with social media, an easy mistake for businesses to make is not posting content frequently enough and thus losing the interest of their readers. While there’s no consensus on how frequently you need to publish content, you should be writing a few blogs or articles every week.
The key is to come with a pace which your company can maintain and stick to it regularly. More important than giving your readers dozens of tiny snippets of content a day is creating a plan for how frequently you’ll post so your readers will know when to visit your site during specific times of the day and week.
Obviously, once you start a blog, you want to try your best to not suddenly stop posting for good. The value of a blog should be apparent within the first few weeks, but even if it isn’t, it’s not a marketing avenue which you’ll want to abandon halfway through its introductory month. Stick with the process and give your readers and customers interesting content to read through once every few days to see maximum effectiveness.
Key Practices
On top of these tips, there are a number of best practices to take up the moment you decide to start a business blog. First, you’ll want to develop a style quickly and efficiently. This style should be one of two things: either an informal tone and voice to create an intimacy between you and your readers, or a tone and voice which most closely matches the style and aesthetic of your brand.
While both methods will work, the former is usually more effective in garnering a following and spreading your blog through word of mouth; again, readers are eager to share content which is interesting to them and which they think will interest others, and a more formal tone can be easily alienating.
Next, you’ll want to make sure your blogs are the proper length. The optimal blog is actually only four-hundred words long, which is not a lot of space to work with. You should never go under this count, as Google will skip over your content for more robust offerings, and if you want to go over, you want to ensure that every word is necessary and contributes to understanding or style. People scan blogs to pick up on key details, so repetition of an important point or two never hurts.
Final Thoughts
A business blog is a great form of digital marketing to attract new customers to your business and create a sense of intimacy between your brand and the world around it. As long as you keep your customers in mind while writing, post frequently enough, formalize a plan, and create a style that belongs solely to your company, your blog will catch fire in no time at all.