After launching a company blog with a few weeks of killer content, it is easy to let the blog fall by the wayside. Everyone assumes that someone else on the team has the time to do extensive research and write some excellent lead-generating content, but without a plan, this may not happen.
Instead of assuming someone else will get around to the blog, there is a simple way to handle blog writing for your website: assign a different person to write the posts each month, and assume they will take about one day to get all the posts generated. Most professional bloggers swear by “batch blogging,” where you get started with writing and find yourself finished faster than expected. Switching who writes each month keeps the ideas and style fresh on the blog as well.
Why bother with devoting this much time to the company blog? There are so many good reasons, but here are just a few.
1) Increased Communication Across the Company and Satisfaction for Marketers
One of the most surprising benefits of blogging regularly is that it increases cross-company communication. Your business may be growing, but the more employees you have, the less easy it is to get new information to the right person. When your staff members know that they will have to write blog posts regularly, they pay attention to the upcoming events and actively reach out for content ideas. This keeps the creative juices flowing and means they will talk to their fellow employees, even from outside of marketing.
Establishing one’s identity as a marketing professional can sometimes be difficult, and when you need a constant stream of up-to-date blog posts, your marketers actually get a chance to establish that identity. They get a chance to take on the persona of your company and write from that perspective, giving them valuable experience and tying them deeply to your brand.
This is an internal benefit, which isn’t to be taken lightly, but the other items even more directly affect the bottom line.
2) Better SEO Rankings for Your Website
Google and other search engines care about how frequently you update your website blog, so your site ranks higher if it is regularly updated. In general, having more content optimised for a wider variety of keywords will also help your site pop up organically on more search engine results pages.
3) Better Information About What Appeals to Your Target Market
When you look at the website analytics page for your various blog entries, you’ll begin to get a very valuable picture of what people like and don’t like. If you’ve posted 20 posts so far, look at the top 5 and have your team analyse what they have in common. Generally, you’ll get a bit of a brainstorm based on what has turned out to be the most popular content:
- Maybe your customers love humorous content
- Maybe these posts are all practical how-to posts
- Maybe your customers linger on “explainer” posts that delve into the nitty-gritty of the product or service
Whatever you learn, work to replicate that success for the next 20 posts and beyond. Re-evaluate periodically and see if there’s even a way to pass this trend analysis on to your product development team.
4) Create Forums for Customer Engagement
Blogs with comment sections offer a valuable opportunity for your team to see what your customers are thinking about and let them become connected to your brand. As long as the comments section is positive and constructive, you’ll find that the kinds of website visitors who want to comment are also more likely than the average visitor to click around and get to know your company as a whole.
5) Build Value for Your Users
Your customers will build a warmer and more positive connection with your brand if they feel like they are being “kept in the loop” about what is going on at your company. When true brand loyalty is built, the customer actively wants your company to succeed. One way to do that is by giving them such useful, entertaining, or interesting content that they keep coming back, being exposed and re-exposed to information about your product along the way.
6) Go Viral With Shareable Content
Content that is so fun or interesting that readers want to share it on social media offers you a form of built-in advertising: the more people share your posts, the closer you get to a “viral” trend. If you have the good fortune to go viral, your product and service sales will be positively affected by the increased exposure to your brand, but this is more likely if you are constantly adding new high-quality content.
7) Establish Your Industry Authority and the CONTEXT for Your Product/Service
Many people talk about wanting their branded blog to exert “thought leadership” in the industry. Certainly, excellent content can aim for that goal, and many achieve it. You do want to be the place that people go for definitive resources and excellent advice.
However, one component of thought leadership that many people skim over is that your blog can create greater and more valuable contexts for your product or service, showing people how to incorporate your company’s product into their lives. Yes, you can do it in a quick call-to-action at the end of the post, but ideally, you should also be engaging them in an imaginative exercise all the way through the posts as well. Keeping an up-to-date blog helps expand the number of people who want to be users of your products and services.
How much time is enough to allocate to this work? It will vary depending on your goals, but a good place to start is by aiming for one informative blog post per week. Remember: the same research and content work that goes into your blog posts should be repurposed and repackaged for social media posts, email campaigns, and eventually bundled together into content offers like White Papers and eBooks. This work does take time, but remember that all the above benefits are available to you with just a few hours a week devoted to a high-quality blog update.
In summary, an up-to-date blog is well worth the time it takes to maintain, because it creates so many other opportunities for value in building your brand. If you want help writing killer blog posts, we have resources to help you get there. Check out our blog post on Generating Content Ideas to Keep Your Blog Up to Date for more information.
