Blog posts offer an opening for brands that allows their prospects to explore their website further. This raises a brand’s chances of getting not only leads but also loyal customers who are likely to return to the website—if they’re provided with the information they’re seeking.
What is Blogging?
Blogging is a type of content marketing strategy used by brands and organisations to achieve certain brand goals, including but not limited to—introducing a brand to its audience, getting more sign-ups, creating a loyal following, and so on. It is (and can be) many things, but the most important role of blogging for brands is its ability to provide value to its readers.
By definition, a blog is a written piece published by brands and individuals in order to share information on topics within their niche or industry. It can either be used to satisfy personal use or as a means to achieve business objectives. Blogs, however, are not written at random; they have to be written with your buyer persona in mind. This means that every blog you write and publish must be attractive and relevant to your intended readers.
Blogging for Brands
As of writing, there is a whopping 1.9 billion websites in the world. A sizeable portion of those are blogs written about a variety of topics. Searches for “blogging” and related keywords are also on an upward trend, which means people are still interested in it or at least, keen to discover how it can help boost their marketing strategies, too. Writing articles is good for increasing revenue and the website’s traffic, as well as positioning yourself as an industry leader. All these seem ideal, but the path towards becoming that is anything but easy.
Businesses use a slew of content types to achieve their business goals based on measurable metrics they’ve set for the company, blogging is only one of these means. The goals could include increasing brand awareness, making a sale, expanding sales list and leads and so on.
Remember, the primary role of blogs must be to provide the audience with a solution to their problem or an answer to their most pressing concerns. Thus, a blog you release must be timely and relevant to the experiences of readers within your niche and industry.
However, there is no one recipe for success; after all, blogs cater to different niches and industries. But some facts do reveal how to achieve success with your own blog and content marketing strategy; like how long form articles with at least 2,000+ words are more likely to have better results than short articles or that “how-to” or instructional blogs get a wider readership than other blog forms because detailed, step-by-step articles are very popular among readers.
Need more convincing? Here are other blogging benefits you should know about:
***Helps drive traffic to websites: ***Blogging is an organic way of driving new readers or traffic to your site. Because some webpages on your website can remain dormant for quite some time (you don’t really have to update your services page every week, do you?), you can expect your blog or editorial section to keep your website fresh. Updates to this page can send signals to search browsers that your website is active, helping you show up on SERPs which then raises your chances of getting discovered by searchers through organic search. A HubSpot study discovered that blogging leads to at least 55% more site visitors and 97% more inbound links. This traffic, as well as the visits, are important because they often result in an increase in leads as well as sales, while inbound links are likely to increase your site’s webpages’ chances of getting recognised by the search engines.
Helps convert traffic to leads: Good blog content can encourage people to follow you for more. This way, your readers don’t just end up as mere eyeballs but also potential leads who can help you accomplish certain brand goals. Just make sure to pepper your blog with the appropriate CTAs whenever needed so they’re guided and encouraged to perform accordingly.
Blogs can be repurposed as content for social media: Another good thing about blogs is that you can repurpose and convert them to other media forms, the most popular of which is social media. You can turn your data and the things you’ve written into social cards, produce a video out of it, expand it to create an eBook, or send it to other websites as a guest post to reach more audiences. There are so many ways you could transform and exhaust your blog post.
Five Blogging Tips for Brands
SET BLOG GOALS
Having a clear vision of your desired outcome helps in creating metrics and measuring said metrics once you’ve published your blog. For example, you want to get more people to sign up for your newsletter. This, you can measure by adding a CTA to the blog post that redirects them to a sign up page and then observing the conversion rate. Aside from your goals however, you have to be wary of what people in your industry—especially your target readers—are interested in. Remember, a blog is a marriage between your audience’s needs and your own ability to provide them with value and while doing so, connect it with your goals. It has to be relevant and useful, but also be an extension that allows you to introduce solutions that your brand can cater to.
SECTION YOUR BRAND INTO TOPIC CLUSTERS
Topics or content clusters ensure that you are able to create strong, internal links that help users and search engines connect your content with each another. For instance, because our company offers more than digital marketing (we also do web design and development as well as UI/UX research and design!), our content team here at Amber Creative makes sure that we write about topics that cover and highlight these services, too. We started by breaking down all of our services (aka our expertise) and helping our audience find the information they need and want better through tags or internal linking, which also improves user experience. These categories and clusters help audience, as well as crawlers (the bots), get an idea about what business you’re doing, as well as the products and services you offer so that they can link these pages to searchers.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
We’re risking sounding like a broken record here but one last reminder doesn’t hurt: when blogging, you should always remember that you are, first and foremost, writing for your audience—not for you. That’s why it is so important to know what they would like to see, what topics you can cover and potentially write about. To do this, you must begin by creating a sketch of your ideal persona. These people’s needs must align with your business services and products. Make sure you merge your theories about who they are with actual data you or your industry gathered. Knowing your audience helps you write what articles they’re interested in, as well as clarify what tone, voice and/or approach best connects you to them. Say you’re in the beauty industry, but are focused on a very niche section like young, female professionals. It’d do you well to know the ins and outs of their lives, what things a general portion of them are interested in (connected to your products) and then highlight these through your blog.
CREATE A CONTENT CALENDAR
When writing blogs, it’s important that you go through it with a plan. Structured blog posts can help the readers make sense of the “content hierarchy” and connect each blog with one another. Planning a general blog schedule—with rough titles, brief thesis statements about what the blog posts will be about, focus keywords for SEO, as well as target dates for posting—helps you commit better. This doesn’t have to be a strict structure; make sure to leave room for flexibility to make way for blog posts about more urgent stuff like industry updates or business events and promos. The monthly plan can get you closer to understanding your objectives and seeing how close you are to achieving them. This is also important for consistency; like we said, it doesn’t have to be rigid. We recommend allowing yourself some flexibility in the work that you’re doing, but remember that following a schedule can sometimes even help build reader anticipation over your content.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
This could be as basic as what topics are trending in your industry or what keywords are being thrown around. Forums are great places to look at. Even simply browsing competitors’ content can spark an idea. It’s imperative for you to have a keyword list of topics that relate to your brand. Around these keywords are subtopics or clusters that narrow the focus of each blog post. For ideas, you can look at your competitors’ websites to see what they’ve been posting about or try looking at forums like Quora or Reddit or tools like Ask the Public to gauge people’s pulse online. Even the google related searches can inform you about what topics your intended readers are looking for and possibly more importantly, what keywords they’re using to search for these. If you’re engaging with your audience, then it’d also be wise to check out your or your competitors’ comment sections to see if users bring up any concern that needs to be addressed. This can be an opportunity for you to provide solutions for them through a blog post.
CREATE OR HAVE ACCOMPANYING VISUALS
By visuals, we’re talking about more than the thumbnail images for each blog post, but also (maybe even more importantly), images inside the blog post itself that helps provide a “break” for your readers. Visuals help them engage better, and a more engaged reader is more likely to digest information better. Visuals can also be in the form of static images, short video clips, GIFs, infographics, tables, etc.
REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT
Another good thing about blog posts is that they can be reused to feed other forms of content you wish to publish for your brand. For example, you can get a soundbite from your blog and then post it on your social media assets like Twitter or Instagram. While you have to reuse it in a way that’s suitable for the social media site you’re planning on publishing it to, having blogs is great in making sure you’re not constantly racking your brains for new content every time.
(It’s easy to butcher your blogging strategy, make sure you don’t. See blogging mistakes to avoid here.)
A blog is a marketing asset as much as it is a marketing tool because you benefit from having a blog—and your readers benefit from reading it.
It’s a mutually beneficial content type that yields great rewards for your brand when done right.
Ready to begin your own blogging journey? Let us help! Drop us a line right now and let’s explore the benefits of blogging for your brand together!
