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Launching a new company blog is a great way to achieve a number of important business goals, such as boosting the visibility of your company in Google search results and generating new leads. However, you can’t expect to go from 0 to 60 overnight. Here are three important points to keep in mind:
#1: Your blog must align with the needs of your audience
When creating a new blog, it’s easy to turn the project over to the marketing team, which surely has its own ideas of what types of content should be appearing there. There’s one big problem here – you don’t want your blog to become just a confusing mix of “marketing babble” and blatant product placements for your own products and services.
Instead, the focus should be on creating value for your customers and prospects. What types of problems are they having that you can solve? What are their concerns? How are they actually using your products in ways that you didn’t expect? By answering these questions, you will have a much better idea of what types of content will resonate with them.
For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, think about the types of content that will resonate with local foodies. If you’re a hardware store owner, think about the types of home improvement projects that your customers have been asking you about.
#2: You must come up with a promotion plan for your blog
One common assumption is that once you go to the trouble of launching a new company blog, people will appear by the truckload. You know, “if you build it, they will come.” However, that’s not the way the Internet works. It may take months of consistent posting before it seems like Google even recognizes your blog exists. And it may take even longer than that to acquire credibility with your industry’s influencers.
That’s why you need to think about ways to promote (and cross-promote) your blog. For example, within every weekly email newsletter that goes out, include a reminder about your company blog. On your company’s business cards, include a link or mention of the blog. On your company’s social media accounts, include regular links to your best blog posts. Over time, all of those efforts will work wonders.
#3: You need to measure the success of your blog quantitatively
Once you’ve set up your blog, you need to set up a plan to measure its success. Create a set of metrics to determine how well it’s doing. For example, at the very beginning, your metrics might include site visitors and user comments. As the blog gains momentum, you can include metrics like social media shares or Facebook likes. By focusing on data, you will have much better insights into what’s working, and what’s not. And don’t worry – there are plenty of free, off-the-shelf solutions to help you measure success, such as Google Analytics.
Running and maintaining a company blog can turn into a valuable goldmine of insights about your customers and, better yet, help to create a vibrant community of passionate fans, supporters and brand ambassadors.
