Creating a blog to highlight your brand is a great way to achieve multiple objectives at once. With a well-conceived, well-executed company blog, you not only can draw potential customers who are seeking information about your industry or the type of service or product you offer to your site, but you can also position your brand as an authority and thought leader in your space.
Once people have discovered how valuable your blog is, you may find it serving as one of your main sources of lead generation. Before launching your blog, though, there are some key points to be aware of that will help ensure it achieves your strategic goals for writing it. Here, 14 members of Forbes Agency Council share the advice they would suggest if one of their clients came to them for help in building a blog that showcases their brand and drives traffic and leads.
Members of Forbes Agency Council share tips to help businesses launch an effective blog.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Know Why You’re Starting A Blog And Who Will Feed It
Before launching, ask yourself why you’re starting a blog. Blogs are helpful for SEO, but certain industries (such as travel) are already hyper-optimized. How will you get traffic? The next question is, “Who is going to feed the blog?” Blogs may be “free,” but your time is not. They can be great tools for companies with realistic goals and resources. – Jim Tobin, Carusele
2. Understand And Listen To Your Audience
For B2B brands, the blog isn’t about you. It should be about the concerns, challenges and opportunities the members of your target audience—your customers and prospects—face every day. If you provide “gifts of knowledge” to your audience with information that helps them solve problems and seize opportunities, they will reward you by engaging more deeply with your brand. – Robert Finlayson, Bold Marketing and Communications
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3. Focus On Your Audience’s Needs
People are savvy, and they’ll see a sales pitch coming from a mile away. Don’t waste your time on promotional content with a thin layer of story on top. You’ll build trust with authentic content that solves problems for your audience, and then the rest of your website should do the work to make the hard sale. – Samantha Reynolds, ECHO Storytelling Agency
4. Don’t Pretend To Have All The Answers
A blog is one-way communication, not a client discovery session. So, avoid blindly telling your audience that “this is the solution to your problem” when you don’t know the specifics of their situation. Instead, offer unique suggestions or use case studies to educate. I often ask questions of my readers to get them to consider different options or viewpoints. – Scott Greggory, MadAveGroup
5. Post Consistently Across All Social Channels
A consistent posting schedule across all social channels is critical in order to be “discovered” by both your followers and new audience groups. Social platforms have tweaked their discovery algorithms over the past to favor content creators who post regularly. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC
6. Be Authentic And Real
You are writing a blog because you are presumably a thought leader in your industry. That means your knowledge about whatever you are writing about is valuable. So no matter if it is an in-depth topic or just a fun supplemental piece, keep it real and use your actual voice. Corporate speak is a no-no and gets passed over quickly. People want authenticity and are willing to look for it. – Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing
7. Remember That You Are Not Writing For Yourself
Always remember that you’re writing for a specific audience, not necessarily for yourself or your brand. The key is to address your audience’s needs, wants and challenges with insights into how they can be better at their jobs, be better leaders or learn something new. A good blog starts with a good understanding of your audience. – Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.
8. Focus On Quality, Helpful Thought Leadership Content
Begin with a content strategy focused on quality, helpful thought leadership content. Avoid self-promotional content as much as possible. Instead, focus on answering your prospect’s questions to aid in their decision-making process. I’ve seen companies where over 85% of their website visitors’ first interaction is the blog, and this always starts with creating quality, helpful content. – Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
9. Always Optimize Your Blog Content For Search
A blog is a golden pathway to great search results if well-optimized with keywords and alt text for images. SEO is an important part of any marketing strategy, and blogging is an excellent opportunity to seed long-tail keywords that your customers are typing into Google. If you’re putting the time and effort into creating content, optimizing it for search helps people find what you’re sharing. – Carm Lyman, Lyman Agency
10. Be Bold Or Go Home
No one wants to be the consumer of your long-tail-keywords strategy anymore. Instead, produce something your core audience can get excited about and be inspired by. WeTransfer, for example, identified that its core audience is creatives. Instead of always answering the question of how to share large files, the brand created a beautiful blog about art projects around the world called WePresent. – Melanie Marten, The Coup
11. Don’t Forget To Promote It
Blogs are for content marketing, but many brands forget about the marketing part. Typically, brands write an article and post it on their site. You must share the article across social media and via email. If it’s really good content, then you should even go further with SEO backlinks and a press release. Allow the blog article to be a lead generator. – T. Maxwell, eMaximize
12. Know Your Audience, Your Goal And Who Will Write The Blog
Who will write it? Who is the audience? What is the goal? All of these answers give you the same starting line for a blog strategy—is it worth the time to achieve the end result, or are there better ways to get long-form “blog” content out into the world to create the desired result? Most brands would benefit from a Medium.com account versus an on-site blog. – Vix Reitano, Agency 6Ba
13. Start By Doing Research
Whenever clients want to launch a new blog, I tell them to start by doing research. What keywords and topics are popular among their target audience? How long should their blog posts be—short-form or long-form? Does the intent of their posts match an effective sales funnel? The biggest piece of advice I have for clients is to make sure they have the resources to post consistently. – Marc Hardgrove, The HOTH
14. Follow Your Brand Positioning
Follow your brand positioning as you have defined it. Often, companies spend a lot of time thinking through the brand strategy and then leave it behind when it comes to the actual implementation of it in the real world. – John Assalian, Viewstream
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
