Blogging: The Ultimate Start-Up Guide
The term ‘blog’ is pretty dated now, so call it what you may—native publishing, native content, company updates, a news section—but writing and publishing on your website is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics a business can employ.
What a blog can do for your business
- It acts as a key driver of traffic to your website. You can then optimise your website to ensure readers sign up to a newsletter/offer, make a booking/reservation or purchase. These outcomes can be tied directly to revenue (woohoo!).
- It can feed your newsletter (eDM) program. Use your blog as a key source for regular communications with your database. Rather than writing new content all the time for your newsletter, you simply link through to the latest updates on your site.
- Whether it’s content which educates or entertains, your company is providing something free and of value to customers. This strengthens brand engagement and loyalty.
- Blogging improves your credibility with Google and can increase your site’s organic SEO rankings for key search words and terms.
- Publishing positions you and/or your brand as an industry expert. Traditionally, speaking at events or partaking in media interviews were the only ways to do this. Nowadays, a blog gives you a free and direct public platform to share your expertise with customers and industry.
- It can help to measure your marketing activities. Use blog URLs as a call to action at the end of social media posts, newsletter articles, media releases and the like, in order to track audience, click-throughs/conversion. This is especially effective for e-commerce businesses.
Essentials to a strategy
When developing your blog plan, consider the following:
1. How will you provide value (education, entertainment, monetary value) to the reader?
Rather than leading with sales messages, consider leading with engaging how-to articles, or timely news. If there is a sales message, place it at the end of the blog article and consider sweetening the deal by providing an exclusive discount or offer (e.g. early bird) only applicable to members of your database community.
2. Staying on brand
Make sure that your blog is authentic. Stay true to your original mission and stick to your company’s tone of voice. Are you a serious brand, or is your brand irreverent and funny?
3. Realistic resourcing
Rather than relying on one employee to write all of the content, it can help to engage a writer (budget permitting). Alternatively, identify which of your staff have an interest in writing and then have one or several contribute.
4. The reader call to action
Always, always, always have a call to action at the end of your blog. This will ensure you can track engagement and sales leads. It could be a button to purchase or a contact person/sign up form for more information. Whatever it is you want your audience to do after reading the blog, tell them, and then ensure you can track the results.
Developing your content
Next is to brainstorm some key themes or content types. Marketing folk refer to this process as developing ‘content pillars’. Content pillars will help inform your story ideas in the future, and also ensures consistency for the reader.
But which ‘pillars’ will work for your blog?
Start by thinking of your customers. Write down your three customer types and then brainstorm content each would be interested in or find helpful. A great place to start is to consider the types of questions already asked frequently by your customers.
Here are some common examples used in the food and wine industry to get your creative juices flowing:
- News - Dedicated news stories, including new product launches and developments.
- Team - Profiling expert members of your team in the form of interviews or Q&As.
- How to guides – Content which helps upskill your audience. Recipes are a typical 'how-to' content type for hospitality and food businesses, as are itineraries in tourism.
- What’s on – Promotion of live or recorded events/webinars. Post COVID, face to face events would be core here.
- Audience specific content – For CommsClass I tailor some articles specifically for one sector, e.g. hospitality or tourism, but for you’re a consumer brand you might tailor articles around the interest of ‘industry’ or ‘kids/families’.
Best practise formatting
When it comes to writing your blog, you’re not going to get the attention of your audience writing lengthy, technical or esoteric copy. Website readers are lazy. They’re skimming for the information they need and are downright ruthless with wordy or flowery text.
- Trim the fat by deleting any words which don’t add value. This includes the use of ‘that’ or ‘like’.
- Get rid of industry jargon. If your grandmother wouldn’t understand the term, replace it with a word she would.
- If you still have sentences longer then 17 words, edit them back or split into multiple sentences
- It must be scannable. Replace commas with bullet points, keep paragraphs short, insert subheadings to group paragraphs together.
- Check for common grammar mistakes, e.g. using it’s (a contraction for it is) when you should be using its (a possessive, no apostrophe). If your grammar isn't up to scratch, download Grammarly. You'll be amazed at some of the errors you miss!
Best blogging platforms
You’ll need a cyber place to publish these words and I highly recommend you make it a website. This blog will be your owned words, so post them on a platform you own. You can then copy and paste the article to LinkedIn, Medium or other publishing sites relevant to your business.
Speak to your web developer on whether your current platform has blog functionality. If you are looking to launch a new site for your blog, we highly recommend:
- Squarespace: For those who love a beautifully designed and simple site (CommsClass is a Squarespace site). With little to no knowledge, you can put together a site in a matter of hours.
- Wordpress.com: The biggest system for blogging and website content management (CMS), for those seeking a more robust site which can be fully customised.
Coordinating your social media & newsletters
By now, you should be chomping at the bit to start your blog. If not, it’s probably because you’re scared of the writing workload.
I have some good news… writing a blog doesn’t have to a tonne of extra work, you simply need to streamline your existing marketing copy development.
Let me explain with a real-world example.
Your brand is releasing a new product. Up until now, you’ve been spreading the word across all your social media channels. You write social posts for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Plus, you produce a newsletter, and potentially you have a PR team writing media releases. You might have two or three staff writing separate pieces of copy for each of these channels.
With a blog, you can publish ONE piece of master copy, say 300-words and then simply draft a short summary/excerpt to promote the blog link on social media and in your newsletter. Link all of your amplification channels to promote the one blog.
So, you’re not writing four or five updates like you were before, you’re writing one. Streamlining the process further, you can also use your blog in lieu of a media release to keep your media list informed.
Measuring success
Your method for measurement is simple, you’re looking at visits to that one blog page, and engagement on your call to action (rather than counting different types of metrics across all of your social media channels).
With the right e-commerce setup and Google Analytics training, you can also track sales generated from the blog. And that’s a measure of success all of us (and especially our bosses) understand and love.
So, time to start blogging! Questions? Shoot me an email at [email protected]