Blogging can be an extremely valuable and influential tool for companies across all industries, regardless of size. When done right, corporate blogs can contribute to a positive return on investment (ROI) and serve as a strong lead generation tool to turn potential leads into prospects and prospects into paying customers. In fact, B2B marketers who use blogs acquire 67 percent more leads and B2C marketers that blog generate 88 percent more leads per month than those that do not. By making a corporate or consumer blog a top priority, businesses have the opportunity to engage with targeted potential customers and consumers on a more personal level and influence decision makers during the buying process, while also building credibility of the brand. To ensure a successful blog, businesses first must revisit their content strategy to make sure all components are streamlined. Here are four tips to consider when defining your organization’s content strategy to set your blog up for success: 1. Know your audience. Providing compelling content that engages and resonates with readers is a crucial ingredient in establishing a successful corporate blog. It’s important to first conduct research to determine what content readers are interested in, as well as understand current industry trends impacting your audience. Determine what content they find valuable by researching the types of content that your audience is engaging with or following on social media, or by connecting with them directly on platforms such as Twitter. Also recognize what competitors are talking about and how they are communicating with their audience members. Ask yourself the following questions to ensure you’re providing the right types of content: “What are relevant thought leaders or influencers discussing?” “What types of content do readers engage with most via social media?” “Is my content following current trends?” 2. Develop an SEO plan. Once you determine the type of content your audience wants, it’s important to consider search engine optimization (SEO) as part of the greater content strategy. According to MOZ.com, SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. To incorporate SEO into your content strategy, businesses should first define a set of keywords they would ideally like to rank for, and then tailor content around these specific keywords. Keywords should be relevant to your business and align with your audiences’ online behaviors and search patterns so that content can be more easily found in search results and align with their intended search topic. This increases the likelihood that readers will stay on the page they land on instead of bouncing back to the original search results. The better you know your audience, the better you can create quality content that is of value to them so they stay engaged and continue to return to your content. 3. Promote the content. After the right type of content has been identified for your audience and crafted with relevant keywords in mind, outreach and promotion should be taken into consideration. Overlooking the distribution of content can have serious consequences on the success of a corporate blog and the overall content strategy. Quality outreach and promotion will help ensure that the content is ranked higher in search results and easier for readers to find by generating backlinks, or incoming links, which are links to your website—or in this case, the corporate blog—from other places on the internet. By promoting blogs through social media, email marketing and other distribution strategies, more backlinks can be generated, boosting SEO efforts and making the content more search-friendly to your audience. 4. Keep it consistent. Finally, remember to be consistent. By writing between 21-54 blog posts, you can actually increase traffic by up to 30 percent. Once you get people to read your content, it’s important to keep them engaged and interested on a consistent basis to keep them coming back, and ultimately transition from an unknown visitor into a paying customer. By incorporating these ingredients into your organization’s overall corporate blog strategy, you can ensure you’re generating the right content to reach and engage your audience members effectively.
