A well-written business blog can be an extremely powerful marketing tool, creating trust and authority around your company and keeping your website vibrant with new content. You’ll engage with existing customers and attract lucrative new clients. In fact, strong writing can often draw people to your company who didn’t even know you or your services existed…until they found your blog post through a search engine.
But a poorly-written blog can seriously damage your company’s image. Clumsy, lazy writing means we’ll assume your products and services are just as bad. There’s no point claiming to care passionately about quality in a blog post clearly written in less than five minutes while sitting on the bus.
So what do we need to know when writing corporate blogs?
Let’s start with a harsh truth…
- Nobody cares about you and your business. Sorry. An effective corporate blog consists of targeted articles far more than diary-style entries. No one outside your company is remotely interested in what happened at last week’s team-building day or whether your boss has just celebrated 10 years in the job. Demonstrate your expertise by providing readers with information they can actually use. Think like your customers. What do they want to know?
- Have a plan. What are you trying to achieve with this post? To build your company’s reputation for quality and industry knowledge? That’s fine. To prompt potential customers to call you? That’s a good objective too. But if you’re simply writing a purposeless blog to meet an arbitrary target of blogging every week, you’re wasting your time and, much more importantly, wasting the time of your readers (who won’t be your readers much longer).
- Don’t advertise the fact you’re advertising. The most effective blogs subtly market your products or services. Blogs that begin with lines like: “This week, we’re selling a range of…” are about as appealing as PPI cold calls.
- Spread your wings. Blogs don’t have to directly relate to your line of business. If you provide luxury inflight catering, blog tips on chartering a private jet. That may not be your particular business but anyone looking for that kind of information on a search engine might well want your services too. And they might never find you if you only ever write about champagne and caviar.
- Less is more. Think hard about how frequently you post blog entries. Rarity creates impact and empty vessels really do make the most (white) noise. A single powerful blog post each month often makes far more of an impression than a constant stream of chatter.
- Similarly, don’t try to download everything you know into every blog post. A blog that rambles on for over 1,000 words is the work of an unfocused mind, which is hardly likely to appeal to the potential customer who wants an efficient service from you. Know what you want to say, say it…and stop.
