We’ve worked with numerous clients who started up a corporate blog due to its many advantages:
- Expanding brand exposure and awareness.
- Increasing search engine rankings and driving traffic to the corporate website.
- Showcasing executives as thought leaders who are engaged with their customers, prospects, partners, and industry peers.
As with any communication medium, it’s important to think through the blog strategy and execution plan rather than just “winging it”. View your blog as a marketing mix element that should be integrated with campaign or communications strategies. Topics can include:
- Industry trends and perspectives on upcoming events or partner relationships.
- Target market pain points and customer use cases.
- Excerpts from new content such as white papers, analyst reports, and webinars.
Companies often underestimate the time and commitment needed to make their blog a success. So, before jumping in, put someone in charge to “oversee” the blog and manage the blog’s editorial calendar.
Dos:
- Establish rules on who will blog, acceptable blog topics, and the frequency of blog posts (ideally weekly or bi-weekly).
- Keep it short (less than 500 words) as reader’s attention drops off with longer posts. Use bullet points, images, etc. to maintain attention.
Ideal Blog Word Count According to The Heff at http://blog.pod1.com
- Talk in a personal style, not corporate-speak. Blogs offer a chance to connect with your audience at a personal level.
- Be nice and personally responsible for your comments.
- Cite your sources.
- Invite comments and respond to them. Make sure someone approves/disapproves comments daily. (Or make use of an authentication security box that requires users to decipher and input a graphical code before their comments will be automatically posted. While this isn’t foolproof, it will eliminate bots posting spam on your blog.)
- To increase search engine rankings, use relevant key words in the headline and tags, include links to other blogs and websites, and include graphics with a keyword caption.
Don’ts:
- Use your blog to make a sales pitch.
- Speak about competitors – no need to give them free publicity.
- Disclose confidential information. If your company is publicly traded, do not make any forward-looking financial statements, or even any statements that could be deemed as forward-looking.
Corporate blogs do take time and commitment for success. But the advantages of higher visibility, increased search engine rankings and stronger relationships with communities are worth it.