Corporate blogs are found on the websites of 72% of B2B companies, and 53% of marketers consider them to be the basis of content marketing. Analysts have also found that a blog on a website has a positive impact on a company’s reputation, increases customer loyalty, and provides many other useful benefits for the business.
We completely agree with the analysts and use this channel to promote our own website and those of our clients. A blog really helps attract targeted traffic and increase sales if you work with it regularly and competently. In this article, we will tell you how to do SEO with a blog and share a real case study to show what results can be achieved in just 9 months.
A corporate blog can be used to solve various business tasks — shaping the company’s image, creating a loyal community, demonstrating expertise, and increasing sales. But two conditions must be met:
- Create high-quality content;
- Make sure that this content is seen by the target audience.
If one of these conditions is not met, working on a blog can be considered a waste of money and time.
How to create high-quality content for a corporate blog
We will not delve into the intricacies of copywriting and editing, as these are topics for other articles. In this post, we will define the criteria for high-quality content and what is needed for blog articles to meet these criteria.
There are two general requirements:
Articles are written in the language of the target audience
If you sell welding machines and your customers are professional gas welders, there is no need to explain things that are obvious to them in detail: how a welding machine works, how gas welding differs from electric welding, etc. They already know all this and are not interested in it. It’s a different story if you sell cosmetic procedures and explain how certain technologies work in your blog. In such articles, you need to present information as simply as possible, avoid technical terms, or explain their meaning in detail.
Expert content helps readers solve their problems
The material fully covers the topic, with clear definitions of concepts, examples, and facts with supporting evidence. This is not a problem if the article is written by an expert, such as one of your employees who is well versed in the subject. It’s great if they also have copywriting skills. If not, don’t worry, an editor will correct the style and grammar. If a copywriter writes articles for the blog, they must be checked by experts before publication.
It is not the copywriter, editor, or director who should decide what to write about. Blogging should be part of the company’s marketing strategy. Ideally, a marketer should be involved in drawing up the content plan, and the formats and topics for publications should be selected based on analytics.
In practice, not everyone has such opportunities (or a marketer on staff). Therefore, before you start a corporate blog:
- Study your target audience, their interests, and needs. Focus exclusively on your potential customers. For example, the target audience of a wholesale online toy store is toy retailers, not parents, godparents, and grandparents. Accordingly, you need to write blog posts on topics that are interesting to toy retailers.
- Analyze blogs on competitors’ websites — what they write about, whether their content gets a response. Which topics and formats work best, how they are presented and designed. Choose the most popular options and try to make them better than your competitors.
- Talk to your customers and ask them directly what information they would like to receive and in what form. You can conduct a survey on social media, assign the task to customer service managers, or order a full-fledged marketing study from an agency.
