A recent study found that nearly 90% of marketers use content marketing as part of their go-to-market strategy. The same report found that businesses that employ a content marketing program receive an average of 8 times more website visitors than businesses that do not use content marketing.
Creating highly valuable content that is tailored to your target audience is a great way for a brand of any size to improve brand awareness, generate leads, and nurture existing leads down the marketing funnel. A critical component of a successful content marketing strategy is the blog. Think of a company blog as the foundation of any content marketing plan, this is where most of your content is hosted, and how many prospective customers will come to interact with your brand.
Businesses from around the globe, from New York to New Delhi have created successful business blogs, this article will review a few ways that marketers and entrepreneurs can create an outstanding blog.
1.Create 10X content
Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, is credited with creating the "10X content" standard. This is the idea that in order for content to naturally be discoverable by a target audience, it should be about ten times better than existing content. There are a number of ways that content can be made ten times better, one way is by writing material that is considerably more in-depth than content that is already available. Another way, is by writing content that is easier to digest or is better designed with helpful visuals or video.
The best content will include all of the elements already mentioned, and in so doing, the content will earn social media shares, and backlinks that will improve the ranking of the article on search engines. Social media is probably the most suitable place to make any kind of promotion. For instance, Instagram has been used by all aged people and it's really easy to make any business promotions on the platform. Business owners can easily look for the list of best Instagram growth services and gain more reach on their page. Therefore the promotional posts will be visible to more people.
2.Understand your target customer
In order to create a successful company blog that speaks to the target audience, you and your writers must first understand who the target customer is. The best way to do this is by creating clear customer personas. These personas will include information related to the demographic and psychographic makeup of the customer.
Whether you have a few new business ideas that you’d like to promote through your blog, or you are simply trying to further promote an established business, understanding the target customer will go a long way in helping you to create content that prospects actually want to engage with.
3.Build the blog on an intuitive platform
The content management system, also known as CMS, on which your blog is built is incredibly important for the long-term success of your organization’s blog. Ideally, you’ll choose to host the blog on WordPress since the CMS is intuitive, scalable, and easy to integrate with marketing technologies. (Check out Progress for Maine, to see an example of a well-designed and content focused website built using WordPress).
For organizations interested in comparing WordPress to other CMS platforms, Wix, Drupal and Weebly (among others) are alternative platforms to consider. Larger organizations should also look at marketing oriented CMS systems offered by Hubspot, Marketo, and Adobe.
4.Focus on "evergreen" topics
The term "evergreen" content refers to marketing content that will be relevant for a long time to come. Marketing teams should invest in creating content that will provide steady on-going returns, rather than creating content that is topically relevant for a short period of time, before becoming obsolete.
Evergreen content will provide entrepreneurs and business leaders with a better return on investment, simply because the content has a longer time horizon on which to provide results.
Usually organizations that focus on evergreen content will choose to focus on acquiring new traffic through organic search optimization, rather than through social media. Social media platforms tend to reward timely content, whereas search engines tend to reward evergreen content.
5.Think about the customer journey
A company blog is usually a popular entry point for a potential customer. They often conduct a search with regard to a specific topic, discover a blog post on your blog and explore your website to learn more about their area of interest.
If this sounds like a common customer journey for your organization, consider how you can improve that journey by designing the blog to be rewarding. Consider things like button placement, blog subscriber flow, and archive search functionality when creating your blog to encourage prospective customers to further engage with it.
Conclusion
It is estimated that over 85% of B2B organizations have a blog. Presumably a similar number of B2C organizations rely on blogging as well. Marketers use blogs for a reason, they help to improve customer acquisition and customer retention by enhancing the customer journey.
If you are interested in creating a company blog, be sure to focus on evergreen and highly valuable content to ensure a return on investment. It is also a good idea to think carefully about the CMS you will use, and to get to know your prospective customer in order to create great content.