Two Strategic Corporate Blogging Tips Often Forgotten

Posted on 01. Jun, 2011 by in Blog, content marketing, content strategy, corporate blogging, corporate blogging strategies, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, writing for blogs

Sometimes we get so caught up in blogging for the sake of blogging that we forget the blog’s purpose.

No matter what kind of organization you are with, a corporate blog’s purpose is to attract and/or retain customers.  If that’s not the case, it’s just a hobby.

I talked to two organizations recently on how their corporate blogging can make more impact. Each organization positioned their blogs as the center of their online content marketing. Each one believe they had the right blog frequency.

What did they forget?

  1. Calls to Action – Every blog post should have some call to action.  Even if you are blogging to be found in long-tail search, what do you want people to do once they get to your site? Remember, if at all possible, you want to see a behavior change or action taken (behavior change is core to the definition of content marketing).
  2. Blog to Many – One blog post is just a part of something bigger.  For example, a blog post can be part of a larger eBook. It could be part of a white paper series.  It could be part of an actual printed book (that was my original plan when I started this blog).

A simple spreadsheet like the one below can serve as a reminder as you develop your editorial calendar for content marketing.

So, for every blog post, each keyword phrase leads to a story.  Each story should have a specific call to action.  Many companies, like Hubspot, generally have five to seven different calls to action at any one time.  Most of the time these are larger content packages to draw in people to give up their email information or take the next step in the buying cycle. Finally, consider the blog post as part of one of those larger content packages.  In the case above, the Content Marketing ROI story has a plan of being a part of an upcoming eBook.

(Alison Bolen from SAS will be talking about driving results with your corporate blog at Content Marketing World this September, discussing these very issues.)

Most of the time it’s not about developing more content…it’s about being smarter with the content we are already creating.