Corporate Blogging Best Practices: Part 1
What is a corporate blog?
Simply, this is a blog written and used by a business or organization to further its goals such as increasing sales and customer loyalty. According to a survey, websites that provide an active blog have 55% more traffic coming to their site.
But you can’t write just any old thing and expect people to come read it. The info you provide must be relevant to your industry, relevant to the people you want to reach, and useful (or entertaining depending on what you’re doing).
Corporate Blog Strategy
Here are the first 4 steps you can take to start a good corporate blog strategy that will be effective and worth your time.
Develop Personas
First thing’s first – who are you trying to appeal to? This comes down to who is buying from you. How could you enhance their experience to the point that they become a loyal customer, and where you win over the fence huggers?
Write characteristics of these personas down, and be specific. The better you can visualize your ideal customer, the better you can write to them and figure out what is really valuable to them.
- Industry
- Job position
- Goals
- Challenges, problems
- Demographics
- Location
- Geographic
- Online
The online location is very important. It’s a good idea to find some of these people online and see what they talk about, especially as it pertains to your business. What questions do they ask, what problems do they complain about? Are they on specific social media channels, industry forums, do they write blogs or comment on influencer blogs?
The point here is to develop relationships. It’s much easier to develop a real, trusting relationship when you know who you’re talking to right?
Create a Content Plan
It’s far better to start with the end in mind, or at least with a few months from now in mind. Throw all your initial thoughts and ideas into a spreadsheet, and start thinking about them and expanding into specific topics. Choose a few broad topics and narrow down each blog from there. Create a few series for things that require more explanation, and no need to be brief! Google ranks longer, quality content higher, just don’t start adding fluff. Search Google for a free template for an “editorial calendar” to help you get started.
Do Your Research
Writing things that people will find, and also find useful is obviously very important. So this is where you can start:
- Keyword research: there are lots of tools and strategies out there for doing this. Start by searching on Google for the most common phrase you think people use to find your type of product or service. Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the “suggested searches” and take note, especially phrases that would be perfect as blog topics by themselves. For example, the phrase “what is a corporate blog” is a word that is searched about 90 times per month across the US. That topic relates to the various topics covered in this blog, as well as a few other less-searched words such as “top corporate blog” (20 searches per month).
- Competitor content: what are your competitors writing about, and what topics have been popular vs not so popular? Save time and learn from their mistakes.
- Real data: have there been surveys or statistics calculated for your industry that are share-worthy? If possible, conduct your own research on something that hasn’t been covered properly, or not as well as you could do it.
- Talk to the people: ask your customers outright what they want to know. Use frequently asked questions and expand them into full blogs if possible.
Top Successful Corporate Blogs
Here are a few great corporate blog examples you could potentially model yours off of.
- Facebook – From corporate news, to questions like “is social media bad for us?”.
- Signal vs Noise – Basecamp leaders write about design, business, and tech. B2B.
- Mint Life – Financial planning.
