Businesses are investing more money on content marketing than before and having a corporate blog is part of their overall digital marketing strategy. However, most of them fail with corporate blogging and they either give up believing that it's a waste of time, resources and money or they continue doing the same mistakes without a getting a real return.
Before getting into the actual mistakes and how to avoid them, it's good to outline a few statistics (taken from content marketing institute survey, 2015) from companies that use business blogging effectively so as to understand the importance of making your corporate blog a success.
- More than 80% use Blogs as a B2B content marketing tactic.
- More than 60% state that blogs are among the most effective tactics.
- 'Brand awareness' is the most important content marketing goal.
- Creating high quality content is their top priority for 2015.
Using the Wrong Blogging Platform
Not all software platforms are meant for blogging. Your corporate website may use an expensive content management system but when it comes to running a corporate blog you need flexibility, usability and SEO friendliness. It's a mistake to try and run a blog on a platform that is does not have the features a blog is expected to have for SEO purposes like well formatted URLS, proper page structure with H1 tags, canonical URLS, title and descriptions fields and many more.
A common way to overcome this problem is by installing Wordpress as part of your main domain (mycompany.com/blog) or as a subdomain (blog.mycompany.com) and use it to run your corporate blog.
Publishing Posts that are Too Promotional
The corporate blog is not the place to directly promote your products or services. You can do this on your website pages. The blog is the medium to get the attention of your potential or existing customers so that they engage with your content. To be able to do that you need to constantly publish evergreen content that provides a value to the reader. By adopting this approach you will gain a number of benefits, one of them being an increase in your organic traffic.
Publishing Posts that serve no Marketing Purpose
While you should not make your posts too promotional, anything you publish on your corporate blog has to be part of your content marketing strategy. A well designed content marketing plan clearly identifies the profile of your potential readers and your posts should target that audience.
Lack of Social Media Promotion
Publishing content on your blog is not enough, you need to promote your content through all available channels and this includes your social media accounts either organically (i.e. by publishing the post link on your social media pages) or through advertising i.e. promoting your posts using facebook and linkedin ads or promoted tweets.
Targeting the Wrong Keywords
One of the reasons you are blogging for business is to boost your SEO and get more visits from search engines. In order to do that successfully you need to do your keyword research and find those keywords that are related to your industry, are aligned with your marketing objectives and are relatively easy to target.
A mistake many companies do is concentrating only on the high traffic keywords believing that this will get them more traffic but in reality this is not the case. High traffic keywords are also high competitive and it will take a lot of time and effort for the average corporate blog to achieve any decent rankings. The solution is to go deeper and find low competition keywords that are easier to target and in many cases they are also more relevant.
Giving up too Early
Blogging as a sales channel is proven to work but it takes time. Don't expect to see any benefits from the first few months. Building an audience and establishing a presence in social media and good rankings in search needs time and patience.
A common mistake is setting up a blog, publishing a few posts and then because you don't see an increase in traffic you give up. What you should do instead is make sure that you have a good monitoring system in place which lets you track the position of your content in the search engines and the engagement it receives from social media. There is no magic way to get your blog posts on the first page of Google as soon as you publish them but by tracking your ranking positions you can identify progress. An improvement is an encouraging signal that what you are doing is in the right direction and will eventually generate some good results.
Having no conversion goals for the blog
Many corporate blogs concentrate only on how to get more traffic and forget about conversion goals and traffic utilization. Getting people to your blog is the first step but you also need to have clear goals on what you want the readers to do next. Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter, do you want them to visit your main website pages or download a brochure? All these are examples of conversion goals you can set for your blog and depending on what you want to achieve you should use the right tools.
If you want them to register to the newsletter, do you have the signup box in a prominent position? What do your metrics say, what percentage of readers sign up? How do you plan to do A/B tests and get more conversions? Answering these questions will help you realise the value and importance of having a corporate blog that does not only bring traffic to a website but it also works towards achieving your marketing objectives.
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