Corporate blogging is one of the most vital parts of content marketing. In a statistical report published by HubSpot in 2018, 55% of marketers say that creating blog content is still their top inbound marketing priority. Blogging is a tactic used in marketing mainly to help businesses reach more audiences and increase their visibility. While popular for growing and connecting with your online audience, some creators are still prone to commit blogging mistakes.

In order to avoid crippling your content marketing initiatives, keep your eyes open to these common corporate blogging mistakes:

• Not using data to plan for and create your content
• Not having a clear goal for the content
• Not optimising your article for SEO
• Failing to establish connection among articles you’ve published
• Not engaging your audience or readers

Not using data to create your content

One of the most glaring corporate blogging mistakes a given brand can commit has a lot to do with not using data to drive their content. Content not backed by data is a hollow tree; knock one over, even softly, and it comes tumbling down. That’s why creating a clear content plan for a given period is critical to starting off any content. You need data in order to justify your content and be credible. Data could come from three main sources: your competitor, industry trends, and social listening.

Competitor analysis gives you an insight to your competitions’ strengths and weaknesses. Their strengths can help you benchmark worthy tactics you may be missing, while their weaknesses help you build something better. What you can’t find within your competitors, you spot from the industry itself. Industry trends help you predict a lot of things, including consumer behaviour, advancements in the field, and innovations. You can then talk about these data in order to stay relevant to the industry. And finally, social listening penetrates your clients’ psyche. Some content creators would use people’s “online chatter” to crowdsource ideas, see what their prospects and clients are interested in, and schedule the best time to post their articles.

Not having a clear goal for the content

Content is the undisputed king of the whole digital marketing agenda, but without clear goals, it’s nothing. To illustrate your goals clearly, you need to first know who you’re writing the content for. Before starting anything, ask yourself these questions: What would my audience be interested to read? What type of content would be valuable to them? How can I best communicate my message? Answers to these questions define your brand voice and communicate your message well to the market that you know and understand.

When corporate blogging, you also need a strategic method to help you get the most out of your time and effort. Content marketing goals can be as general as educating your audience about the industry, exploring a problem plaguing your prospects, illustrating your relevance or benefits, and so on. Ultimately, these goals get you from one point to another until you reach your audience in an impactful manner. Another way of measuring the effectiveness of your content in getting you closer to your goal is by determining your key performance indicators. KPIs gauge whether your content is effective and giving you the best returns. Our previous article dealt with four KPIs that you shouldn’t forget to measure, but for content blogs, you can just focus on leads and social engagement metrics.

Not optimising your article for SEO

The more you publish content, the greater chance you have of increasing traffic to your website. For your audience to see you, your content must be optimised for SEO. To do this right, you must know what your audience is interested in by doing some keyword research. They basically tell you what your audience is looking for and what experts or other content creators are focusing on. The keywords help you address customers’ concerns better, leading to a more engaged and more invested audience. The keywords are then inserted into the title, header, the meta tags and description, and the article body itself. Here’s a good, detailed HubSpot article on blog SEO that you can check out.

Another thing to consider is article readability. Content management systems help analyse articles for readability. WordPress, for instance, has the Yoast SEO plug-in that scores your article (backed by Flesch Reading Ease test), which allows you to adjust and edit your content so that it has a greater chance of ranking well on Google. It focuses on subheading distributions, paragraph and sentence lengths, the number of transition words, use of passive versus active voice, and so on.

Failing to establish connection among articles you’ve published

One of the most common (yet widely dismissed) corporate blogging mistakes content writers are prone to commit is failing to connect one content to another. Some creators see one content as a stand-alone. When you view your content like this, however, you miss out on the opportunity to build your brand’s credibility. You can’t write in isolation, and overtime, blogs can help you connect one aspect of your topic to another one within your brand.

Learn to show hierarchy within your blog content by including internal links into your article. Internal links are links that connect your article to another page within the same domain or website. These links establish the importance of certain pages and provide signals to Google so that the browser can help you rank better. One way of ensuring that we do give a nod to previous articles is by planning to release a stack of related ideas. This gives us a chance to refer our readers back to our previous articles and lets you explore topics further.

Not engaging your audience or readers

The last, but possibly one of the most glaring, blogging mistakes you can commit is not engaging your audience. Engaging your audience is one of the most critical goals of writing content. Readers must see an opening and it is your duty to provide it to them. After all, you’re not preaching to a dead crowd. When you write for an audience, you must make sure that you actively engage them, that’s why concise writing is critical to any marketing or advertising efforts. Verbosity is prone to confuse your audience, especially the audience who primarily sought you out to get quick answers to their inquiries. Marketers must then remember to use active voice instead of passive when writing the content in order to attract an audience that appreciates curt, but informative content online.

Another way to engage and make sure you open the doors for your audience is by including clear CTAs. The CTAs help you generate leads and eventually conversions for your brand. It’s one of the last yet possibly one of the most crucial aspects of content writing. Once you call to mind the issues that may be plaguing your readers, the natural conclusion is to establish your ability to solve that problem for them. CTAs are curt and active and must be visible to your audience. Typically, a blog is peppered with CTAs within the article itself, but more so at the bottom page.

Conclusion

Corporate blogging mistakes can curtail your content’s ability to attract the audience to your website and finally, to your blog. To combat these, remember to put your audience at the forefront of your plans; creating content based on their interests and editing to suit their needs.

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