– Guest blog by Emma Cownley ( Jot Jot Boom)
The relationship you have with your customers is important. Over half of consumers (64%) say they want brands to connect with them in a more meaningful way, but firing emails and print marketing off into the ether can quickly lead to decision overload and marketing fatigue.
Lucky for you, there’s a comfortable middle ground: your company blog.
Maintaining that all-important consumer-brand relationship can be as simple as a series of optimised, strategic blog posts, repurposed to suit several different platforms.
Think of it as long-term inbound marketing which boosts your SEO.
Because that’s what it is.
Here’s why you’d be remiss not to put your business blog to work and how you can use it to keep those customer leads nice and toasty…
Business updates
Things are moving pretty rapidly for everyone right now — service levels are changing; stock levels are fluctuating; and opening hours are subject to change.
Your blog is a great place to post these updates, especially since things will probably change too rapidly to warrant an FAQ page update. Information is key during uncertain times — a recent survey by Kantar showed that 75% of consumers expect regular updates from brands.
Aggregate all your latest news into short, regular posts (once a week or once a fortnight should do it) and keep everyone in the know.
Better yet, it’ll stop clients and customers from having to chase you for updates which, in turn, will free up your customer service team for more important tasks.
Top tip: Resist the urge to get gushy. We all love talking about ourselves, but customers don’t enjoy reading it (I can promise you).
Instead, chop your updates into concise bullet points or break your copy into short paragraphs with sub headers for easy navigation.
Friendly inbox banter
Don’t be tempted to drown your customers in a flurry of hard-sell emails just to maintain a thread of communication. Instead, pull your blog articles through into a monthly newsletter which functions as a digest of updates, news and stories.
This is nice because it keeps the lines of communication open and engages customers without asking them for their money.
For the best results, try to keep topics varied: interest stories, inspirational posts, business updates and maybe an article or two that you’ve aggregated from relevant publications. A survey by Sprout Social showed that 51% of consumers say their relationship with a brand only starts once they feel their desires and interests are understood — a good content plan can do this for you.
The aim is to get people clicking through to your site — you’ll be driving up page views, increasing page dwell time and hopefully driving traffic through to other pages as readers move around and browse other articles etc.
Be sociable
You can also put your blog content to work on social media. Posting about new articles (or even old, evergreen content) gives you something relevant to chat about, drives traffic to your site and helps Google index the page.
According to SEMrush, 94% of marketers use social media to distribute their content and reach their customer base. And that many marketers can’t be wrong.
The social format allows people to engage directly with the content, so don’t forget to invite an interaction when you write your post.
Top tip: For best results, make sure you’re choosing the right platforms for the content type…
- PR or business updates to LinkedIn
- Image-based posts or mood boards to Instagram or Pinterest
- Articles to Twitter or Facebook
- Video content to TikTok or Instagram
Go organic
Organic traffic, that is. Choosing the right keywords for your business type and using your blog to regularly update them is a brill way to keep traffic flowing to your site without even trying. In fact, SEMrush says search is the number one driver of traffic to most blogs, so you’d be foolhardy not to optimise yourself!
Building posts around keywords you want to rank for will help new customers find you and can help cut down the cost of outbound marketing. You’ll be squeezing every last drop out of the content on your site, especially if you use your blog to pull customers into your sales funnel.
Hand the mic over
Remember when we talked about customers not caring about you? It’s such an important point that we’re covering it twice.
Pass the mic over to your customers and interview them for customer stories and testimonials. Not only is it excellent long-form blog content (which Google loves) it gives your customers a little boost and acts as social proof for you and your company.
Two birds, one stone. And a blog.
Ready to blog off?
Before you go, here are a few best practice blogging tips to help you on your way:
- Don’t forget to use keywords in your meta data and image names
- Enable comments on your blog posts and use the outro of each post to invite interaction
- Keep paragraphs and sentences short and snappy. No one wants to slog through a post that looks like it was written by Tolstoy.
- Avoid content overload — blogging once or twice a week is ideal.
For more writing advice, come and find me on my blog at Jot Jot Boom. Too busy to blog? Hire me to blog for you (I love it).
Emma Cownley