In the digital age, so much of your marketing success depends on your online presence. Just as you wouldn’t run a shoddy, run-down brick and mortar store, you simply can’t have a tacky-looking website. By the same token, you need to give potential customers a reason to come to your site. Gas stations operate on razor-thin margins on gasoline to get customers into their convenience stores — the real moneymakers. Similarly, many business websites use a content-rich, regularly-updated blog with appeal to their target audience to drive traffic to their site. And just because you aren’t a digital marketing expert, doesn’t mean you can’t put together a great blog your audience will be drawn to.
Sites like Entrepreneur.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com offer some tips on getting a blog set up, and we also have years of experience developing blogs for our customers and for our own business needs. Below are some tips to help get you started.
Targeting
It’s important to clearly identify your target audience and cater your content carefully to that group. You might be able to appeal to a broader audience with more generic or fluffier content, but how many of the people in that audience can legitimately be considered potential customers? Staying focused will help translate into a higher conversion rate of site visitors to customers.
Consistency
In general, it’s crucial to ensure that your blog is an accurate reflection of your desired brand. This means that it should convey the appropriate tone, exude the appropriate level of quality and authority, and cover issues and topics related to your business in a manner that is consistent with any other communications from your organization.
Quality
A related, but critical, point here is to ensure high-quality writing and accuracy; that may mean hiring writers if you, or someone on your staff, doesn’t have that expertise. At a minimum it should mean having someone edit whatever material is created so that at least two pairs of eyes are looking at the content. Simple grammatical errors can reflect very poorly on a brand and damage the reputation of the business and business owner.
Regularity
A good blog should be updated frequently and regularly. A blog is dynamic; putting out a couple of posts at the beginning of the year and hoping to attract repeat visitors is a fool’s game. You need to generate regular, fresh content to keep your audience coming back. One of your goals should be to develop your brand as an expert in a particular field and attract the business that follows. That’s hard to do unless potential customers keep coming back and start to develop a positive impression of your site and the company behind it.
Setting up a quality blog might seem like a daunting challenge at first, but once you’re up and running, it’s just one more part of your routine, and you’ll be amazed by the payoff in terms of customer visits and increased revenue.
Are you a blogger? What tips and advice would you share to help other marketers leverage the big benefits of blogging for business success?
Strategic Communications specializes in high quality, customized content creation. Need help creating content for your blog, web site or other communications? We can help.
Tags: blog posts, bloggers, blogging, content management, content marketing, Customer Communication, freelancer writing, online communication