7 Things Every Marketer Should Know to Build a Better Blog
By effectively using a blog as the core of your social media, content marketing and search optimization strategy, your business can effectively compete today.
Most businesses are still at a point where they can be more nimble and react more quickly to a dynamic environment, but they still need overall planning to ensure they keep their business on track for success.
To help your business organize and maximize limited resources, you need a platform in the form of a blog and a marketing plan. Here are 7 Things Every Marketer Should Know to Build a Better Blog:
#1. Begin With The End in Mind. Establish your blog’s purpose. Your blog must have well-defined goals aligned with your business goals. To be effective, write them down. I have seen businesses transform their levels of success almost instantly simply as a result of getting clearly defined and written goals. Also make sure that every team member involved knows what you’re trying to achieve.
#2. Know Your Audience. To create content that resonates with your target audience, you must know who your prospects and current customers are. You need to create clear focus and identify where there is a potential match of your information and the needs of your audience. This will create an easier time converting them to customers.
#3. Create an Identity and Brand. Incorporate your business’ brand into every aspect of your blog. Your businesses must ensure that every aspect of their marketing helps build and reinforce their brand. Therefore it’s important to ensure that you extend the salient attributes of your brand into your blog such as your blog name, the language, the images, color and other elements.
#4. Optimize for Search. Don’t underestimate the value of optimizing your blog content for search. This means focusing each post on a keyword phrase, incorporating the keyword into your title and URL, adding text to non-text content and linking to internal and external resources.
#5. Motivate to Action. Give your readers a reason to find out more about your business or to engage with you. Incorporate specific call-to-actions and links to your product where appropriate. Also personalize your landing pages to keep the wording consistent.
#6. Promote and Expand. No matter how good your writing is, you have to expand your reach and bring people in. This includes building an email list for your blog and distributing blog content across social media platforms, interest groups and communities. Also, you can use your offline establishment to expand your audience. At a minimum, use your email signature file and your business cards.
#7. Measure and Grow. All marketing initiatives need measuring. It’s critical to access your progress, as your blog grows and evolves, take time to experiment with different things. This includes post topics, column formats, titles and other content factors, and measure the results. Select appropriate metrics based on your blog objectives. Understand that it takes time to achieve your blogging goals.
While blogs enable businesses to level the playing field, they require careful planning, quality content, effective presentation and cross-channel distribution to achieve their goals.
Question: What else would you add to this list to help businesses build a better blog?
