Blogging is a great marketing tactic that not only gives your website search engine optimization (SEO) benefits, but also helps curate a brand personality for your business and lets you speak to newsworthy or interesting topics in your field. The main goal of your blog is to engage with your target market, existing community and strengthen your company branding.
Most website platforms have blog functionality ready to go, and on custom sites, it is a pretty basic feature to set-up.
While the main content should be text, adding video and pictures make for prime pieces to grab your audience’s attention.
Your brand personality is a set of characteristics that consumers connect with your business. For example, you may want your brand to be whimsical, artistic with a high degree of customer service. You can write content that helps you communicate those traits to your potential customers or clients.
Why Blog?
A blog gives you the platform to:
- offer a solution to possible problems of your clients
- highlight testimonies and case studies
- start a conversation with your audience
Why is this good marketing? Because people don’t want to be sold to. They want to do business with brands that they can connect with, that add value to their lives, and blogs provide an added value as long as your content is not a cloaked sales pitch.
Search Engine Optimization helps people find your website. By blogging, you are supporting search optimization when your posts include keywords that are important to your business or industry. Blog posts also make your website more robust, with more information for visitors to peruse, which looks good to search engines. Google “rewards” sites that maintain fresh, unique content that is keyword friendly, and includes valid links to external reputable sources. (And this also helps you make sure that your blog isn’t all about you!)
What To Blog About?
Brands can use blogging to comment on newsworthy topics, start a dialogue on an issue related to your service industry or product lines, engage in community advocacy, or answer common questions that get asked by clients or potential customers. It is important that your posts aren’t all about you – they should be about what you know about. They need to speak to your target audience, so avoid technical language or insider abbreviations unless your audience understands those terms.
Your core audiences are interested in reading insights on trends relevant to them. Use your expertise to help your audiences understand a topic.
Blogging Keeps Your Brand Relevant
New blog posts are a great way to keep your website feeling fresh. It gives people a reason to come back to your website. People tend to stay on your website longer when viewing a blog post and on average visit a higher number of additional pages, especially when links to the main site are included in the post.
How Often to Blog?
If you are doing no blogging at all, aim to post once a month. If you are posting sporadically, take the time to make a master calendar and plan your posts so that you posting at least monthly. For those already blogging regularly, go for 2-3 posts per month.
Now What?
You’re writing engaging blog posts on a variety of topics, using good keywords, including links and posting regularly. Now what? Reuse that content! Not on the blog itself, but in all of your marketing. A single blog post can provide numerous social media posts – pull out a teaser sentence and link to the blog. And include the blog in your email marketing each month. Don’t publish the whole post, rather provide an intro paragraph and a “Read More” link to pull people to your website. And at the end of the year, you can post a blog post that lists your “Top 5” blog posts of the year, which will help you get more mileage from those posts.
Measure
Like all marketing activities, blogging should show some ROI for your business. Use your Google Analytics to monitor the success of your content. This gives you insight into what your audience is interested in as you plan future content, and you should expect that users who enter your website via a blog post link will also read other pages on your site. If you aren’t realizing ROI or you aren’t sure, it may be time to consult with a marketing pro for advice.
Want to blog but not sure if you want to go it alone? Arlington Strategy’s team of digital and content marketing professionals are available to help, give us a call or send us an email.