Jessica Mehring
No matter the size of your company, having a blog is beneficial for so many reasons.
A blog helps you:
- Share your expertise with your target audience
- Build your company’s credibility
- Get found in search engines
- Build your brand
- Communicate with customers
- Move visitors down the sales funnel
For some reason, however, corporations and large businesses sometimes struggle to get the full impact of this powerful content marketing medium. Read on to learn how to make your corporate blog more successful — even within the confines of corporate branding guidelines.
Blog About What Your Target Audience Cares About
Sure, you can share company news on your corporate blog. But if that’s the only thing you’re sharing there, you’re not going to attract very many interested readers – much less return visitors.
Consider what your target audience cares about.
- What problems does your audience have?
- What solutions are they looking for?
- What advice do they need?
- What information would most affect your audience in their everyday lives?
This actually isn’t as complicated as it sounds. As a large corporation, you probably already know your audience well. You can easily get inside their heads. Now just use that knowledge for your blog.
Use your knowledge of your target customers to make your corporate blog more interesting.
A coffeemaker company could blog about how to make the perfect cappuccino.
A printer company could blog about the difference between a multifunction printer and an all-in-one printer.
A business development consultancy could blog about the top ten mistakes salespeople make during their first call with a new client.
Think about what your target audience cares most about, and write about that for your corporate blog. Not only will this help your audience connect with you, but they are already googling these topics.
Don’t Let Your Blog Float in Outer Space
Once you’ve hit the publish button, you’re done with your blog, right? WRONG. After your blog post has been published, now it’s time to publicize it.
- Share the post on your company’s social media channels
- For your company’s email newsletter, write a compelling introduction and include a “read more” button to read the rest of the blog post
- Encourage employees to read and share the post with customers, friends and family
Other Tips for Making Your Corporate Blog More Successful
- Put your best writer on it, or hire a professional writer. Quality matters
- Have a variety of employees write the posts to showcase a variety of voices on the blog
- Keep up on what’s happening in your industry and your target audience’s industries, and write appropriate (respectful) commentary
- Eliminate the corporate voice and write posts in first person. This is more personable, and if done well will still be professional
- Kill the corporate jargon
- Share research, stats, reports and numbers in interesting ways. Try an infographic approach!
- When you do promote your own products in a blog post, make sure the focus is around the benefit to the reader
- Share case studies, real-life examples and interesting stories
Your corporate blog is a fantastic opportunity to connect with your target audience and get found in search engines – if you do it right. Don’t fall into the “corporate blogs are all company news” trap. Write about what your audience cares about, and your audience will not only seek you out, they’ll keep coming back for more.
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