A business blog is one of the most cost-effective and easiest ways to promote your business. Done right, it can drive traffic to your website, increase your sales, establish you as an authority in your industry and also help you to reach new markets.
Unfortunately, many small businesses are yet to wake up to the benefits of this tool. Valid reasons range from lack of time for writing the blog posts to a lack of ideas for quality posts. Here are the top tips for writing and building a successful business also known as a corporate blog.
What Is A Corporate Blog?
A corporate blog is a blog run by a company and its employees. Here the company publishes articles on customer-relevant topics, service articles, and insights into everyday work in the company. Either the company has their in-house writing team to serve the purpose or they hire professional essay writing service UK.
A corporate blog is usually part of the marketing strategy: It serves to strengthen the branding, retain customers, attract new customers, convince them of its know-how and inspire them. This means that the corporate blog can also be part of a company’s recruiting strategy. And: A blog strengthens the visibility of the company via a search engine.
1.Define The Goals Of The Blog
As always, the most important question arises even before the start of a project: What (and whom) do you actually want to achieve with the blog? Probably the most common purpose of corporate blogs is branding, i.e. to publicize or strengthen a corporate brand. Blogs are a direct line between customers and companies. It can use this wire in a number of ways.
For example, the blog can provide direct insight into day-to-day business. Employees write from a personal perspective about their daily work and the atmosphere in the company, which important topics they are currently dealing with, or where there may be problems at the moment.
This type of corporate blog is used to present the company’s work vividly and to give it a face. Authenticity is the most important thing: the stories told in the articles should be relatable, the people performing (and thus the company) should be sympathetic be. In one sentence: The corporate blog makes a company human. This strengthens the brand with both customers and business partners. And: It works as a recruiting advertisement.
Potential employees gain insights into real working life and can be convinced by the positive working atmosphere. But be careful: constantly exaggerated self-praise is quickly put on.
Another approach can be to set up a service blog. In the service blog, the articles show very practical benefits, everyday applications, and how-to(s) relating to the company’s range of products and topics.
This has two effects: companies that operate in more abstract or hidden service and product areas can show how their work can be felt in people’s daily lives. And it shows customers and business partners: We know exactly how to achieve results and in our work, we never lose sight of how our services should ultimately help people and customers.
Another possibility: a topic blog. Of course, every corporate blog should be thematically limited. But it can be beneficial to focus your blog on a specific niche, such as AI or robotics as a technology company.
The blog picks up on the latest trends and developments in the subject area, evaluates them, and shows how the company deals with them. Are we particularly committed to the latest hype and are we at the forefront of change or do we perhaps have alternative ideas and ways to achieve goals? The topic blog lets the company’s know-how shine through.
It signals: We know our way around and are always up to date. We are experts and know how to assess trends and use them for ourselves.
2. Hit The Right Note
As already mentioned: There should be people in the corporate blog. While the company website usually describes the company in a professional and matter-of-fact way, the corporate blog can be a little more relaxed.
Authors are welcome to write from a first-person perspective and incorporate their individual opinion so that one can guess their personality. They can tell what motivates them, what they enjoy, and what frustrates them.
Humour and little anecdotes from everyday working life arouse sympathy. The articles are more of a report than news, more of a comment than a report.
3. Proper Planning
Setting up a corporate blog doesn’t sound that complex. You grab a few employees who contribute more or less regularly (they already have the know-how for article content through their job). But if you just start out into the blue, you can quickly see that we have taken over something. It is therefore important to clarify some capacity issues before starting.
Do I have enough topics for posts? In the beginning, the topic pool often seems limitless. But a good corporate blog also provides for a number of years still good and new content. The topic focus that you decide on in the blog must therefore continuously provide new approaches, for example through new developments and innovations.
If the topic pool doesn’t expand by itself, at some point authors will have to work on increasingly remote and “niche” topics. It’s not much fun, either when looking for a topic or when writing.
The second question: do we have enough time? The workload for a corporate blog should not be underestimated. Creation of editorial plans, topic search, research, writing, illustration, editing, technical implementation, possible community management – none of this is just done on the side.
If a corporate blog is to be really successful, it must have the same priority as other projects. That is why it must always be clarified that there is capacity in the team at all. A half-hearted implementation does not strengthen the branding – on the contrary, it can even cast a bad light on the company.
And in the end, of course, the question remains: do we have enough authors? Employees can be great experts in their subject – not everyone can write well.
Therefore, the blog posts can be very time-consuming if, for example, they have to be revised several times before they sound good. That also takes the fun out of the authors. It is therefore important to find a permanent core team of authors. Ideally, they can write in an appealing way or at least learn to do so through repeated work on the blog.
But it also applies: everyone has other tasks. It is hardly possible for individual employees to take a day and a half to write a blog post every week. It is therefore important to have a sufficiently large team of authors.
Conclusion
Most large companies now have a corporate blog: They have discovered the opportunities and advantages of the medium and are using them to strengthen the brand – with careful planning, clear objectives, and the right tone.
