Let’s face it, there are too many blogs out there and too many of them suck. The main reason for this is because businesses read that they should have a blog but don’t understand what it takes to make it work for them. This just leads to hours of wasted time over posts that won’t be seen by anyone. It’s a pity because with just a little research and analysis it’s possible to make your company’s blog provide truly compelling content that not only drives traffic to the website but converts it into paying customers.
Engage Your Audience
Company blogs have a tendency to come across as overly technical, impersonal and self promotional which makes it hard for users to feel engaged with them. Yes, it’s okay to talk about your own news and achievements but it’s important to marry this with providing readers with useful and usable information.
To engage your audience you need to talk to them like you are sitting across a coffee table from them, not presenting to a board of investors. Modern day online consumers want to feel a personal touch when reading a company’s blog and that means that it should be written with personality. Don’t be afraid to let your personality come through in your posts, it makes them easier to read and makes your company seem more in touch with your customer base.
Analyze Your Posts
It’s not enough to just add a new post to your blog every now and then and forget about it. Promoting your content through your various social media channels is a given but what happens after that? Do you know how the post was received? How much traffic did it drive to the website? How much of that traffic converted into a sale or sign up? These are the things you need to analyze to work out which posts work and which don’t.
Once you can see that a post has a low bounce rate, the user stayed on the page long enough to realistically read it and then they moved on to perform a meaningful action on another page then you know that you have done something right. It’s not a case of simply repeating that same post to achieve continued success but you can analyze how it was written, the tone used, facts given, if it was a tutorial, if it was text or image based etc. and work out what your audience likes.
Find The Gap In The Market
It’s vital for any blog that you aren’t just churning out the same old content that all of your competitors are. If you do you’ll most probably find that your content gets lost in a sea of online noise along with the others. You need to do some research and find out exactly what your customers are looking for and provide content that fulfills those needs. This may sound pretty tough but no one should know your customers as well as you do.
Picture who your typical customer is and think about what age they are, what interests they have and why they would want to choose your business. That way you can tailor your content to meet their needs and preferences. If you are a construction company for example and you find that you are getting lots of call outs for small jobs that aren’t worth your time you could create a how to guide on your blog to show them how to do it themselves. This saves you wasting time on some, low paying jobs while providing your customer base with real, useful information and they will be more likely to use you for bigger jobs now they know that they can trust you.
OutDo Your Competitors
Look at what your competitors are creating on their blogs and come up with a plan to either improve upon what they are offering or write about the things that they have overlooked. Also take note of how your top competitors market their blog posts and interact with their customers through comments and social media. If someone in your industry is doing it right and getting success then it is possible to piggy back on their success by developing a similar content strategy of your own.
You should always be sure to use your own voice though, don’t try to be the same as your competitors, the public like when a company has its own personality and sense of identity and it will help you stand apart from the others.
Stuart Cooke is the Director of Levity Digital, an SEO agency based in the UK helping businesses to create content that their audience wants to see.
