Blog posts continue to be one of the most popular and effective ways to reach a targeted audience today.
Yet, many businesses have yet to create one. Why do they need to reconsider and start blogging now?
Blogging can serve as a surprisingly powerful marketing tool for your business, helping you attract new customers and keep in touch with those who are already on board with your product or service.
Consumers these days loathe being sold to, and with so much content cramming the web, companies need a new way to stand out without focusing solely on promoting their products and services.
A corporate blog can accomplish this and help you expand your reach. But having one is only as good as the planning that goes into building it.
For this, you’ll need to create a content marketing strategy that includes all the factors required to ensure it succeeds.
What is a Corporate Blog?
A corporate blog is a relationship-building tool.
It allows you to converse with consumers, providing them with valuable information, while also giving them the opportunity to interact with the content.
A corporate blog is operated by a business with the express intention of fulfilling one or more marketing goals, such as increasing site traffic or the number of email subscribers.
For a freelance blog writer, a corporate blogging gig can serve as a way to boost the value of their writing services and enhance their own credibility as an expert within a specific industry.
Corporations can use these blogs to show their human side, which is increasingly important to the newer generations.
The focus of any corporate blog, however, is to address a target audience and entice them to learn more about the company, product, or service.
You can accomplish this by regularly adding content and avoiding the urge to inundate readers with too much promotional material.
Overall, a corporate blog can meet a variety of marketing goals, including building connections with readers, encouraging engagement, conveying authority and trust, and addressing each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Should You Create a Corporate Blog? 7 Benefits
Approximately 128 million people in the US alone read blogs for information and entertainment.
Not only do they read blogs, but they also engage and even convert into customers because of them.
While only you can decide whether creating one is right for your business, from a marketing standpoint, a corporate blog is a priority for your inbound marketing strategy.
1. Increase Site Traffic
Did you know that adding a blog to your website can increase traffic by more than 400 percent?
When publishing high-quality content, users have much more of a reason to visit your site and stay a while.
Then, if you have more content for them to browse while they’re there, you can keep users returning for more, ensuring that they’ll continue interacting with your brand.
2. Establish Authority
One way to elevate your brand within your industry is to establish yourself as an authority.
Doing this will help build a more robust audience and increase your link network as other blogs start linking to your posts.
Best of all, you don’t necessarily need industry stats or technical knowledge to be an authority – simply having lots of experience and insight is more than enough to propel you to the top.
3. Create Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is one of those marketing tactics that are essential for success but hard to pin down.
Branding is little more than putting a logo on a product or web page, but brand awareness goes deeper to connect customers and businesses.
Blogs allow your company to raise brand awareness by showing the kinds of topics you hold valuable and being a vital resource for your readers.
Over time, your brand will instantly connect to emotion or trait (i.e., innovative, tech-heavy, fun, and friendly). Once that happens, your brand awareness will deliver a massive ROI.
4. Engage With Customers
One of the best ways to facilitate positive customer interactions is to engage with users online.
Fortunately, having a corporate blog makes it easy to spark conversation across different channels, including social media and your website.
For example, sharing a blog post on Facebook allows you to cultivate comments from users that may not be on your site.
This engagement can work well for lead generation and improving your overall conversion rate.
5. Establish Trust With Clients
These days, customers will research a company or product long before deciding to buy it.
So, by providing tons of information and insight via a blog, you can establish a connection before a customer reaches out to speak with a sales representative.
Blogs allow you to show potential leads that you know what you’re doing, so they’re more willing to trust that your products or services are worthwhile.
6. Differentiate Your Brand
Regardless of your industry, competition is always fierce.
Plus, you’re not just competing against other small and mid-sized businesses, but also mega-enterprises with deep pockets and instant brand recognition.
Creating a corporate blog enables you to craft a unique “voice” for your business to help your brand stand out.
Plus, if you can provide better insights than other companies, more customers will look to you for advice, helping increase your market share.
7. Expand Your Outreach
Although a blog lives on your website, you can share posts across all channels.
Whenever you publish a new piece, you can share the news on social media, forums, email blasts, and more.
Overall, a corporate blog makes expanding into new markets and territories much easier since you’re offering something of value, not just a sales pitch.
Types of Corporate Blogs
Before you can start producing new content, you need to know what kind of corporate blog you will be.
While the details of your posts may change depending on your business model and industry, most corporate blogs fall into one of these four categories:
News Blog
As the name suggests, this blog focuses on industry news and updates.
While not every piece has to be objective and current (i.e., you can add opinion posts), the primary goal is to be a resource for industry insiders and customers who like to stay “in the know.”
The challenge of this kind of blog is that you have to post often, sometimes multiple times per day, depending on how much industry news there is to report.
Thought Leader
In this case, the blog leverages your unique experiences and insights to share with your audience.
While you can post news segments, they’re usually from your perspective, not just an objective retelling of what happened.
A thought leader blog is a bit easier to maintain if you can craft a unique “voice” that will keep users coming back.
Media Brand
Instead of blogging about specific topics or industry insights, a media brand blog usually exists outside the corporate brand.
In this case, the blog is the draw, not necessarily its connection to your business.
This type of blog focuses on curating content across different mediums, including videos, articles, whitepapers, podcasts, and more.
Campaign Blog
Since blogs are used as marketing tools, it makes sense to leverage the power of a blog for a specific marketing campaign.
Sometimes, you may create an entirely new blog to focus on a specific type of product or service, or you might run targeted posts on your existing blog during a campaign.
Overall, this blog type is often temporary, although it can transform into something more long-term, depending on the nature of the campaign.
Easy Steps to Start a Corporate Blog
Fortunately, starting a corporate blog has always been challenging, thanks to an abundance of user-friendly apps and software. Here are the basic steps involved – from here, it’s only a matter of creating valuable content for your readers.
Step One: Create a Blog Page on Your Website
If you’re using a web host like WordPress, it’s easy to incorporate blog posts. If you’re using a different site builder, you may have to add a plugin or connect your site to a blog hosting service. Either way, have a button on the home page that leads to your blog. This new page should also be formatted to show new posts first and older ones below.
Step Two: Determine the Focus of Your Blog
Once you know what type of blog you’re going to produce, you can determine the overall focus of it. Are you trying to be an industry resource for other blogs, or will this page be a source of entertainment for your audience? Having a focus makes it easier to generate content since you know what will fit within these parameters and what won’t.
Step Three: Research Keyword Traffic for Blog Ideas
Since increasing site traffic is the primary goal of a corporate blog, you should research different keywords related to the blog’s focus. Pay attention to high-ranking keywords with lots of search traffic. As your post gets more traction, you’ll see virtually exponential traffic coming to your landing pages.
Step Four: Figure Out a Publishing Schedule
Sometimes, you should post a new blog post once a week. In other instances, post daily, so there’s always something new for visitors to discover. Also, once you establish a publishing schedule, you can adjust it based on traffic patterns and demand.
Step Five: Start Posting
Ideally, you should have a few blog posts finished before you launch; that way, visitors can browse archived content and new material. There isn’t a “correct” number of posts, but it should be more than one or two.
What Else Can You Do to Enhance Your Corporate Blog?
Writing posts is one thing, but even if you publish regularly, you may need help to build an audience.
So, here are some tips on how to get more traction and start attracting more site traffic in less time.
Understand Your Audience
When creating a new blog post, you want to figure out why someone would want to read it.
For example, if your blog talks about tips and tricks for solving a common problem, it will appeal to those currently facing it.
So, it would be best if you crafted the piece with that mindset so the post is as valuable as possible and will gain traction much faster.
Create a Blog Content Strategy With SEO in Mind
Instead of waiting for inspiration about what to write, it’s better to develop a content schedule and strategy.
When developing new post ideas, you want to ensure they’re related to SEO-friendly keywords.
One of the best ways to get new people to discover your blog is via search engines, so let these keywords act as guidelines for your overall strategy.
Use Captivating Headlines
Did you know that a great headline can increase traffic to your blog by up to 500 percent?
However, avoiding “click-bait” style headlines is imperative, as those can be a huge turn-off, especially for a corporate blog.
Average headlines can lose up to 80 percent of your audience, so you must invest in high-quality, captivating headlines that compel a user to click.
Maintain a Consistent Output
One of the main reasons a corporate blog fails is that it needs to maintain momentum.
Once you establish a publishing schedule, you must follow it or risk losing your audience forever. The longer you go between posts, the higher the diminishing return rate.
Overall, you want your blog to always be in your reader’s mind, even when you don’t have new content posted.
Don’t Forget the CTA
Creating a blog to increase site traffic only works if those visitors interact with your business.
Otherwise, you’ll have huge numbers and nothing to show for it. Make sure to follow these tips for compelling CTAs:
- Keep it Short and Sweet
- Focus on One Task
- Use CTAs to Further Specific Marketing Goals (i.e., add 1,000 subscribers in a month)
Analyze Your Results
Fortunately, data analysis is easy these days, as programs can tell you information about the people visiting your blog. You can pay attention to elements like:
- Heat Maps – Where are people focusing the most as they read a blog post?
- Bounce Rate – How many users leave the page immediately?
- Click-Through Rate – How many readers click on a CTA link?
- Traffic Patterns – Does your blog get a boost in traffic at a certain point during the day or week?
- Traffic Source – Where are your blog readers coming from? (i.e., social media, search engines, or typing your site into the search bar)
Once you have some data, you can adjust everything from your blog content to your posting schedule to improve your stats.
Gather Feedback From Readers
If your blog has a comment feature, consider what people post on your content.
Also, feel free to solicit feedback from readers to understand what they think and which elements of your blog they like the most.
From there, you can create more valuable content to boost conversions and build a more substantial brand reputation.
7 Corporate Blog Examples
Whether you’re just starting to plan or already have a corporate blog, it helps to see what others are doing successfully and learn from them.
Here are seven corporate blog examples that have found ways to stand out from the crowd online.
1. LinkedIn
You already know LinkedIn as a social platform for professionals to connect with each other.
The platform also has a corporate blog that covers relevant topics on career advice, how to navigate and benefit from LinkedIn, and insights on industry data.
LinkedIn utilizes a content aggregation platform to curate posts, calling it The Pulse.
2. MintLife
MintLife is the corporate blog for the personal finance software Mint.
Personal finance blogs are abundant across the web these days, and Mint has found a way to compete with all of them.
Here you’ll find information on such topics as how to build credit, how to get out of debt, the state of the economy, housing expenses, and how to live more frugally.
3. Salesforce
The software company, Salesforce, has found a winning strategy for its corporate blog.
Here you can find content surrounding topics on technology, sales, marketing, and business. Their posts are known to be engaging without pushing sales and advertisement, which readers obviously like.
4. Zillow
As a real estate company, it’s not hard to figure out the types of content Zillow shares on their corporate blog.
From real estate trends to HVAC costs for your home, Zillow focuses on providing the type of information people need in order to make informed decisions.
This blog clearly shows they understand who their targeted audience is and what they want.
5. Canva
For a look at what a stylish corporate blog looks like, check out Canva.
Instead of outrightly promoting their tools, they provide guidance on the best ways to use each one to achieve the results a reader is looking for.
By helping customers understand how to use their services through such things as tutorials, they go the extra mile and give free resources as a way to win over more customers.
6. Zappos Beyond the Box
The online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos takes corporate blogging seriously and is constantly reassessing and updating blog options.
One of those options is titled Beyond the Box and is described as the “official lifestyle blog of Zappos.”
Here they share product knowledge and also post inspiring content to help readers live a more beautiful life. Another popular blog is Zappos Stories, a culture blog focusing on employee stories and business insights.
7. Starbucks
Starbucks takes a different approach to its corporate blogging.
Instead of focusing on their products or the coffee industry, they find ways to relate to their customers on a personal level.
By understanding customer world concerns, such as protecting the environment, they can cater their content to address issues important to their customers on a grander scale.
Corporate Blog Made Easy: Outsource Your Content Creation
Corporate blogs continue to evolve along with consumer preferences and needs and can serve as a valuable marketing tool in your strategy.
There are no signs that consumer consumption of blog posts is slowing down, and if you’re not already benefiting from this, it’s time to reconsider your options.
One challenge of starting a successful corporate blog is writing the actual content.
Fortunately, WriterAccess makes it easy to outsource your content creation by finding high-quality writers across all industries.
Best of all, WriterAccess uses AI to discover these writers, so you’re sure to find exactly what you want.
Start a free two-week trial today and see what WriterAccess can do for your corporate blog.
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