Why a blog could grow your business
In this post we try to explain to you what a blog is and why, in some cases, it is useful to keep one.
The blog is basically an online diary in which more or less long thoughts are published.
It is generally made with a particular, well-defined structure in which the contents are displayed in an anti-chronological form (from the most recent to the farthest in time).
The blog can be a portion of the website or, in some cases, it can constitute the website itself.
Each page published within it, be it an article, thought, multimedia content, etc. it’s called post.
Normally, the application used allows you to create new posts by identifying them with a title called topic, a publication date and some keywords called tags.
Generally, the blog is run by one or more bloggers who publish, more or less periodically, content vaguely similar to a newspaper article.
How can a blog be used?
The content of the blog varies according to the cases and the “editorial” choices of those who publish.
This can be a personal blog or a corporate blog.
In the latter case, the blog becomes a real marketing tool, a means of communication that (if used correctly) can generate surprising results.
In addition to this, the company blog can contribute to the training of its customers and its target audience.
Below we will focus on the latter type of blog.
Who do we turn to?
If we want to be successful with a blog and use this tool in a professional way we must,
first of all, define the target (in English “target”) of our recipients.
Identifying the target of your customers is not a trivial step and consists, in a nutshell, in recognizing the distinctive characteristics of our typical customers.
To do this, you must first know your product / service well and then make an analysis of the people who request it the most. How old are they on average? Are they mostly men or women? What work do they do?
These are just an example of the questions to be answered to define your target customers. The more questions I answer, the more precise the target will be.
Returning to us and to our blog, when we write we must not forget, to reach the conversion stage, which is our target customer reference.
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What to write in the blog
When we talk about the content of the blog we cannot fail to keep in mind the marketing funnel to which we have proposed to give life.
Without going too far on the subject, it is enough to know that the term funnel (funnel in English) refers to a web marketing strategy that aims to guide the user on a path that starts from the moment he becomes aware of your site. and of your company up to the one in which, it is hoped, it will purchase one of your services/products.
The funnel consists of various steps and, returning to our discussion, our blog posts should be created with these steps in mind.
Following this logic, you will be able to create the first introductory articles, in which your business, your work experience and your training course are presented, and then move on to in-depth articles on the services and products offered by our company.
When creating these articles it is good to keep in mind one concept: for people to read the posts it is necessary that the topics covered arouse interest and that provide readers with the information they are looking for.
It is therefore worthwhile to ask yourself before starting to write: what do people who visit our website/blog need? What information are they looking for?
By providing them with the information they seek (obviously if the information you provide is correct and comprehensive) you will allow people to know and trust you, professionally speaking.
They will therefore be more likely to contact you when they need to purchase a product/service or to have professional advice.
For our company, for example, we have identified two main types of recipients:
- Customers already acquired
There is, in fact, countless information that we want to give to our customers.
We have clients who are on a tight budget, but who need ongoing training.
We create free guides and training articles for them to help them grow online. - Potential customers
We address an audience made up of people who have not yet purchased one of our services but who, through our articles, begin to know us and establish an initial bond with our company to which they could turn in the future to carry out operations they do not know manage independently.
There is also information that we are interested in distributing to customers in general because this helps improve collaboration with BASE315.
Let’s take a quick example that concerns the second of the two cases described above: there are some actions that we repeat often and willingly or there are some indications that we must provide practically to all our customers.
In our case, for example, we often have to teach a new customer how to send large files; if we had to rewrite all the documentation every time we would lose a lot of time.
And if we assume that time is money, it is certainly cheaper to be able to limit ourselves to sending him an email with the simple indication:
“ Dear Customer,
regarding your question on how to send large files, by clicking on the following link you will find all the indications to proceed:
“ How to send large files from your pc “
Why is it useful to have a corporate blog?
In addition to the advantages mentioned above, consider that blogs are well rated by search engines; their posts, in fact, normally contain a lot of text, which (if original and relevant) favors the positioning of the web page that contains them.
Hence, the blog helps search engine rankings. This, of course, provided that the canons that the engine itself imposes on us are respected, see texts not copied, etc …). If you are interested in learning more about the topic, read also The content of the website).
A good positioning and a lot of contents will allow us to increase, over time, the influx of users to our website.
A high turnout to the site means having a strong and well-known brand and having the ability to convert this traffic in economic terms (purchase of services/products).
Editorial plan
Having and maintaining an editorial plan is essential.
The world of the web is full of cases in which the blogger, after a sort of initial creative frenzy in which he churns out daily posts, loses his enthusiasm and perhaps discouraged by the lack of immediate feedback, gets demoralized and abandons the project.
And then it is worthwhile, to begin with, to dispel some myths.
Making a fortune online is not that simple and if what leads you to flirt with the idea of writing a blog is the prospect of earning as much as Ferragni, at the cost of sounding cruel, I suggest you leave it alone.
Sure there are cases of bloggers earning staggering amounts, but most blogs don’t get as successful.
And then it is better to set realistic goals. Which? For example, if we talk about a corporate blog, gradually increase visits to its website.
To do this, it is necessary, as mentioned, to define and then maintain an editorial plan.
To retain your audience, you need to write periodically, which means finding the balance between the resources you need to make the blog work and churn out posts and what the company can support.
Basically: better aim to write one post a month and keep the commitment made, rather than writing 10 articles the first month, 5 the second, 2 the third and abandoning the project on the fourth.
In conclusion, creating a corporate blog can be a valid marketing strategy as long as (like any other strategy) it is not carried out in an approximate or hasty way, but is professionally created and managed and the pre-established editorial plan is followed.
