Posted by Starting up a company blog for the first time can be challenging for a marketing team—what should the blog focus on and how does one ensure its steady growth?
We share the top tips people don’t always talk about when creating a blog.
You can include the below points when creating your blog project proposal and reference them as you create more content for the blog.
Branding
When you create a business blog, it is important to remember one key factor—people aren’t going to find your blog by looking for your company. They will find it by looking for content.
It is only when they discover content that appeals to them that they will actively think about finding out more about the source—the company posting the material.
This is why your blog branding needs to be powerful and relevant.
Most brands have set colour schemes that they use to identify themselves. These colours need to be incorporated into the blog so that people can match the content with the brand.
And branding goes well beyond colours and logos—one of the biggest eCommerce trends is the importance of authenticity—this needs to be reflected in the blog content.
Your content and tone of voice should be consistent with your company’s image because it will have an impact on the way readers perceive your brand within and beyond the blog.
Blog Audience
Source: Venngage
When the marketing team first sets out to create the company’s blog, it can be tempting to keep the scope of the blog as wide as possible.
You don’t want to limit your content ideas because the more wide-ranging your topics, the better your reach will be. However, that is not how blogs work.
If the subjects you cover are too wide, you won’t be able to capitalize on a single niche—the keywords you use will be too wide-ranging to give your blog a good search engine rank.
Instead, work on customer segmentation—who is your company targeting as buyers and how can you appeal to them with your content? Write your blogs accordingly.
You can compile this information by asking your current customers for their opinions—use a survey maker to create a list of 5-6 questions and collate the replies before making your blog.
Visual Content
Source: Venngage
Blogs may have started life as entirely word-based but they have since gone on to use visuals to improve reach and engagement.
There are a number of ways that visuals can be incorporated into a blog—blog headers, illustrative imagery, GIFs, as well as various types of infographics.
Using visuals in your blog helps your content stand out. The more relevant and powerful the visuals are—such as infographics—the more gravitas it gives your content.
You can source images from stock photo websites, or use online tools to create visuals.
Most website builders—eCommerce and otherwise—accommodate visuals, which will make the process of adding imagery to your blogs much easier.
Written Content
Blogs are driven by great written content—this is a no-brainer. But creating written content without a purpose isn’t going to make the blog a success.
We have mentioned choosing a target audience for your blog, and this needs to be a driving factor for choosing topics and tailoring your content.
Try writing about a topic from various levels—beginner, intermediate, and expert—to reach numerous people within one niche.
Tackle one subject from different angles—how would marketing deal with a product launch? What about operations or administration?
Your content needs to be error-proof—consider installing the Grammarly Chrome extension for instant typo fixes and suggestions for improving your writing.
Of course, SEO for small businesses is crucial, so a writer’s work no longer ends with writing—you also need to add relevant internal links, external links, as well as keywords.
It is only when you have accomplished all this, can you truly believe that your writing work is close to completion.
Video Content
Videos aren’t a requirement for company blogs, but they do hold some value—a short text introduction followed by a video can help to increase your blog visits and SEO.
You can also elaborate on the information provided within the blog using videos—a quick tutorial, video interview, or a screen-capture illustrates examples better than words, at times.
Of course, when creating these videos, you need to ensure that the production quality is high and that the voice quality is clear—this requires investment in time and money.
That is why videos should not be an area you want to focus too much on when you’re first starting off a business blog—you can contemplate expanding into videos later on.
Sharing Your Blog
You’ve created the blog content but that doesn’t mean your job is over—far from it. How are people meant to discover your blog and follow your brand?
Relying on SEO isn’t enough—you need to get eyeballs on your blog from other channels. The more traffic your blog receives, the better your posts will rank on Google.
How do you boost traffic to your blog? By sharing your posts on social media, and sending it to your database via email.
You can curate a list of recent blogs—or group them according to the subject matter—and build your newsletter around that content.
Always check these email deliverability guidelines to ensure your content doesn’t come across as too promotional—this will keep your newsletters out of the mailbox spam filters.
For social media, you can use a social media scheduling tool to post your blog content at regular intervals, to facilitate smooth traffic to your website.
Repurposing Content
Source: Venngage
Blogs don’t have a single purpose—in fact, they can be repurposed as and when you need them.
What many marketers don’t realize is how multi-purpose a blog can be. Have several blogs on a single subject? Why not tie them together into a white paper?
Stats-heavy blogs can be repurposed as charts or infographics—these, in turn, can be shared across social channels.
Create podcasts and vlogs out of your blog content—you can use these video cropping techniques to publish the same video across multiple social media channels.
There are numerous ways to lengthen the shelf-life of a blog—repurposing content this way will boost your brand awareness and improve site traffic.
Conclusion
Creating a company blog needs some thought and planning before one goes ahead with it—a strong blog can have a positive impact on your reach and revenues.
We have outlined a few key details marketers need to know when they start building a blog for the company. With these in mind, companies can start making blogs and improving their revenue.
Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic maker and design platform. Ronita enjoys writing about visual content marketing, business development, pop culture, and diversity.
Twitter: @Venngage
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Try it for free.