To be on top of digital marketing in 2020, every business should be making efforts to maintain an online blog. Blogs are a great platform to showcase your expertise, which can help establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Successful business blogs have the potential to increase traffic to your website, boost brand awareness, strengthen customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases – while also increasing your ranking on Google.
However, today's consumers can be tough to satisfy. With ever-shrinking attention spans and general distaste for unauthentic and repetitive advertising tactics, it’s harder than ever to break through consumers’ anti-marketing defences. For content marketers, overcoming this challenge means finding new ways of creating fresh, relevant and, most importantly, valuable content that truly resonates with consumers. Fortunately, Wordsmith has collected 4 top tips for not only keeping your business blog active, interesting and high-ranking – but also to keep your messages front-of-mind with target audiences.
1. Speak directly to your target audience
This may sound like a given, but many business blogs fail because they only focus on what they think is important to share, and not what the readers actually want to see. When crafting your business blog posts, it's essential that you write as if you’re speaking directly to them. Try and make it as informative, yet conversational, as possible. Your audience wants to relate to you and your brand, so you need to be authentic in the content you create. If you’re consistently communicating in a relatable, authentic way, your messages will create connections – and eventually, relationships – with your target audiences that will help you build a competitive edge.
But first, you need to firmly establish your buyer personas, as it puts you in a much better position to craft content that resonates with readers and answers their pain points, challenges or questions they may have about your brand or the industry at large. When your target audience looks to your business blog as a “go-to-source” in your niche, that’s when you’ve truly become a thought leader and industry expert in your field.
Chris Cebollero, best-selling author, strategist and CEO of consulting firm Cebollero & Associates explains, “People do not buy services or products. What they buy is an outcome. As we prepare to market our services or products, what problems and pain points are you able to solve for them? That is your focus and how you should market to your clients and customers through all of your communication channels. That is the true secret to business marketing success.”
One man who put this into action with fantastic results was Michael Arrington, American Founder and co-editor of TechCrunch. Starting as a part-time blogger, lawyer Michael Arrington wrote primarily out of a passion for the tech industry, providing content nuggets of truth, transparency and quality, that over time earned him a substantial following of engaged readers. Originally founded in 2005, the site was subsequently acquired by AOL five years later and today attracts approximately 37 million viewers every month, seeking news on start-ups, venture capitalist funding and insight into life in Silicon Valley.
Staying in tune with your target audience is key, as readers are always seeking fresh, new content. If you’re having a bit of writer’s block, we’d recommend checking search engines, news aggregators and social media platforms for trending topics, keywords and phrases that your buyer personas might be interested in. It’s also handy to set up Google Alerts and RSS feeds to monitor what your key competitors and newsworthy sites are saying.
2. Create Matching Content Lead Offers
Whenever we read anything, the main question we’re asking ourselves is, “What’s in it for me?”, what benefit will I get from taking the time to read this? One big benefit that might help to nudge readers towards your final Call to Action is providing a lead offer – whether it’s an informative eBook, a downloadable PDF checklist, whitepaper or eye-catching video series. These premium pieces of content give your readers an added incentive to continue to the end of the article, for key takeaways that enrich their overall experience and even may encourage them to continue engaging with your brand.
An easy place to begin is by taking a look at the most popular blog posts in your website analytics, and creating a content lead offer built around this topic. This lead magnet will not only add value for your readers, but can also grow your subscribers and qualified leads in the process by requiring website visitors to provide their email address to download your best content. Content-rich blogging sites like CoSchedule and Copyblogger offer their readers copious amounts of downloadable guides, writing courses, demo presentations and takeaways that delve deeper into the subject matter, creating engagement through information.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for engagement
If you want to grow your blog fast and increase your readership, consider reaching out to other key influencers in your industry to leverage their audience bases. This can include sharing your post in relevant forums and groups, emailing influencers and asking them to share information with their fans, and even running ads on other related websites that link directly to your blog posts.
Aside from working with other industry experts and brands to promote and engage with your posts, you should also ensure that each article has social media buttons, call-to-action-links, and social media plugins like ClicktoTweet to encourage readers to re-publish your content on their social media platforms. The easier you make it for readers to share your content with their own networks, the more likely they are to do so, which can help to increase brand awareness, conversations with potential customers and ultimately boost click-through rates to your site.
Although best used sparingly, email marketing can be an effective way to entice engaged readers to your blogs. You’ll be amazed at how a simple email request can attract viewers and drive engagement with your blog. Digital publishing site, Medium, knows a thing or two about getting their words in front of the right people – 170 million people to be exact. But when it comes to their email newsletters, Medium keeps it short, concise and engaging to encourage their users to click through for more top-notch blog content.
4. Ramp up the eye-catching visuals
Hubspot research shows that articles with an image displayed every 75-100 words get double the amount of social shares than articles with fewer images. So if you’re looking to boost the reach of your business blog, embedding informative infographics, sharp images and video clips may be a winning strategy to capture your viewer’s attention and get them to interact with your product or service. Using a variety of visual content is also a great way to appeal to a wider net of people with different learning styles, as everyone processes information uniquely.
Video content is one of the strongest visual content tools at the marketers’ disposal. By 2022, Cisco forecasts that video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, so incorporating innovative video marketing into your content marketing mix, will not only help to entice readers further down that yellow brick road to conversion but it will also help to boost your reach and position in Google’s search rankings too.
Episodic content, in particular, is extremely popular in creating a return audience and building subscribers. When you pair that with informative, long-form content, it’s a recipe for success. With a content-focused approach, you can shift toward episodic content and embed it in your blog articles. Whether you want to showcase your business’ unique USPs or behind the scenes footage, this all helps to humanise your business and make it more relatable than if you just stuck to words alone.
Fast Company, one of the world’s leading business media brands magazines that focuses on innovation, technology and world-changing ideas, puts great emphasis on the importance of incorporating episodic video content into their blogging strategy. With a whole section dedicated to video on their website – from trending clips to exclusive full-length interviews and productivity challenges – Fast Company leverages the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and keep viewers on their toes with interesting episodic content while pairing their clips with gripping long-form articles designed to engage, inform, and inspire.
Your blog isn’t just a SEO tool for stuffing keywords into your content. Far from it. Your business blog has the potential to drive traffic to your site, build leads, help establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, boost relationships and increase conversations with new and existing customers while also providing unique value to your readers. Aim to build a connection with your buyer personas by creating strong visuals and long-form content that resonates with them, and you’ll be well on your way to growing a successful blog.
Blogging is and always will be a crowded space, but whether you’re a part-time blogger or part of a larger content marketing team, there are always ways to differentiate your business through innovative content marketing techniques. And if you need any assistance, our friendly Wordsmith copywriters are here to help!