Eliminate these most commonly made mistakes in your business blog and you’ll find you improve your reach, engagement and lead generation.
Content marketing trends come and go, but one that remains constant is blogging. According to Hubspot, companies with an active blog get 55 per cent more website visitors, 67 per cent more sales opportunities and 434 per cent more indexed pages than those without one.
Blogging is an effective way to keep your website up to date, furnishing potential customers with new information and ensuring your rankings don’t slip. Having a blog is not enough, however – it’s important not to limit the impact of your efforts with simple mistakes.
Business blogging is very different to the personal blog you may have had in the early 2000s. It’s not enough to have some great ideas and stream-of-consciousness narratives you want to share with the world. A successful blog for your company must be based on a coherent strategy.
This approach involves collecting data on your business and potential customers to ensure you’re blogging about the right things at the correct time and answering questions visitors are asking. Your content should be useful and with your buyer personas in mind, organised into clusters and measurable against your goals.
Part of your strategy should factor in how your content links together. Standalone pieces won’t perform as well as those that have been properly linked with other parts of your website, including landing pages and previous blogs.
Once you’ve published a blog, you should be going back into previous articles and linking them to your new piece. This will signpost search engines and users towards the blog, demonstrating its relevance in the wider context of your site.
The old adage, build it and they will come, should not be applied to your digital marketing efforts. Writing well-crafted, optimised copy for your blog is time consuming and failing to maximise its potential will reduce its impact and mean you’re not getting the best ROI.
From shouting about it on social media and including it in emails to your customers to repurposing it, there are lots of ways to promote your blog. Encourage members of staff, customers and advocates to share your posts to maximise their reach.
Your blog could be the start of your customer’s journey through your website or may be part of their route to making a purchase, but it certainly shouldn’t be the end of their interaction with your brand. Every blog post should contain a call to action (CTA) guiding your reader to where you want them to go.
Whether it comes in the form of a lead generation CTA directing users to a landing page or simply links to related content, you can’t afford to miss out this vital component. CTAs shouldn’t be an afterthought but baked into your blogging strategy from the beginning.
As you regularly post to your blog you’re not just creating a comprehensive archive of well-optimised articles that provide value to your customers. You’re also gaining insight into which pieces perform well and resonate with your audience, or at least you should be.
Set up metrics to track and use the data to inform future content creation. This is the best way to ensure your blog gets better over time, stays relevant and brings in the leads to help grow your business.
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