If best practices are followed correctly while avoiding the pitfalls, corporate blog can prove to be a catalyst for driving business success
Corporate blogging has emerged as the focal point of business marketing activities for a good reason, it works. It’s an excellent platform to communicate with potential customers and build brand awareness.
If you are looking to generate inbound links and organic traffic for your business, there’s hardly any better alternative than maintaining a corporate blog.
Most of the modern-day businesses create a blog section simply because they feel they should have one. However, just having a blog doesn’t ensure any business benefit. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to establish a successful corporate blog. For that to happen, it’s important to identify what you need to do.
In this article, we are going to highlight some of the best practices to employ – and some costly pitfalls to avoid – for ensuring the success of your business blog.
The do’s of blogging
1. Have clear objectives. For a business blog to yield value, it has to be crafted with specific objectives in mind. You must have clear idea about what you are trying to achieve through your blog. Having a business blog without concrete objectives is similar to boarding a radar-less ship. To run a corporate blog successfully, the first thing you should do is to outline your objectives in a well-documented manner.
2. Care about length. The blog content should neither be too lengthy, nor too short. Longer posts tend to be monotonous for the readers and might deter them from going through the complete write-up. Similarly, articles that are too short often suffer due to lack of substance. According to studies conducted by various market research organizations, articles with 600-900 words works best.
3. Use multimedia. Plain text is simply boring. Spice up your corporate blog with relevant multimedia elements like images, videos and graphics. Multimedia content will not only enhance the visual appeal of your blog, but also keep your readers engaged and entertained.
4. Have structure. A corporate blog must be written in a systematic manner with distinct headers, sub-headers and paragraphs. Include introduction and conclusion sections to summarize the article briefly. Avoid using long paragraphs, to achieve that, break down thoughts into multiple smaller paragraphs for better user experience. Make use of bullet points to highlight important information.
5. Publish quality content. Quality content is the backbone of all corporate blogs. Without quality, it is impossible to build a loyal base of readers. Most well-known corporate blogs utilize the expertise of professional writing service providers. It’s preferable, however, you write on your own, especially if you have a flair for writing. For highly specialized dissertation writing or research-oriented subjects, it’s better to seek help from a professional writer with extensive knowledge.
The Don’ts
1. Don’t lose sight of your audience. Customers are the most valuable asset for any business; you need to do your best to understand their needs. Make use of your blog to communicate with them in a meaningful way. It’s important to engage your audience in lively and meaningful conversations. Communication builds credibility and credibility brings business. Understanding your customers and interacting honestly will solidify your credibility.
2. Don’t use corporate jargon. Corporate blogs should be written in a simple language which is easy to understand for the readers. Formal academic voice should better be reserved for research papers only. Blogs are meant for generic, informal and entertaining conversation that can convey your message precisely to the common masses.
3. Don’t ignore typography. Typography plays a great role in enhancing the visual appeal of a blog. Good typography makes reading a pleasure, while poor typesetting could drive your readers away. So wisely choose the font size, font style, text alignment, line spacing and text/link colors to improve the readability of your content.
4. Don’t be overly promotional. Remember that your corporate blog is neither an online advertising platform nor a press release center. Your main objective is to help the readers by providing them valuable insights. It’s okay to have a call to action directive, but if you get overly promotional about your products/services too often, you may lose readers.
5. Don’t forget to integrate with marketing. A corporate blog is a great tool, but blogging alone is not going to be enough to drive conversions and sales. To maximize the ROI from the business blog, you must come up with a winning content marketing strategy. You should integrate blogging with various marketing strategies like social media marketing, loyalty marketing, and lead generation to enhance the effectiveness of your corporate blogging initiative.
Businesses from all over the globe are successfully using corporate blogs to address various aspects of their business. It requires you to follow a set of golden rules to make the most out of the useful platform.
See related: Powerful Strategies for Strengthening Your Business Blog
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Jack Danielson
Jack Danielson is a freelance blogger, an industry expert with more than 3 years of successful experience in all things marketing, social media, and search engine optimization. As a tech geek, he is continually drawing upon his own talent and skill to help small-to-large corporations and thoroughly enjoys the continual challenge that SEO work brings.