Build a Successful mHealth Business Blog
My number one job as the head of an mHealth marketing firm is to help our clients grow their business. These businesses are continually looking for effective and efficient methods to improve sales. While there are several components to this success, I’m a firm believer that a properly optimized, content rich blog should be a key component of any marketing program–and I’ve written about this before. Consumers of mHealth products and services are spending more time researching their purchase, consuming upwards of 10 pieces of content before purchase. They are also relying on comments and recommendations from members of their own social network before making purchase decisions. Google and Bing recognize this and are placing more importance on social media in search results. As a result, you need to be on top of your blogging game.
I’m always searching for ways to increase the effectiveness of business blogs. Here are 5 tips from Lee Odden on building a successful business blog:
5 Content and Social Media Keys
to Your MHealth Business Blog
- Customer. Problem. Solution.
Gather information related to what your target audience wants, likes and needs are in relation to your industry, company, products and services. Other audience considerations include the people who influence buyers but may never be buyers themselves—journalists, other bloggers, industry analysts, business and marketing partners, existing customers, current employees and potential employees. - Define the topics.
Once you’ve decided on goals, audience and key value propositions the blog will communicate, the next step towards constructing a great corporate blogging plan is to identify the topics. The outcome of this exercise is the start of your blog editorial plan. In fact, any content or media produced and promoted through a business blog should be leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. Being visible through search as well as sharable through social networks is a powerful combination. - What’s the story? Plan the narrative.
Storytelling is one of the things that’s most often missing in many SEO-centric efforts towards blogging. Planning topics for specific audiences is great, but tying them together through a themed content plan, topics and keywords is even better. That means a story expressed through text, images, audio, video, interactive applications and any other content or media that can deliver the customer/brand experience in a meaningful way. - Attract & grow your audience.
One of the most effective models for business blogging and community development uses a hub. We like a hub and spoke model of content marketing and social network engagement which allows for a deep, topical repository of knowledge to be supported by a constellation of social networks and other channels of content sharing. The combination of links and off-site engagement can expose the brand’s expertise to the media as well as new audiences that are not currently aware of the brand’s blog. - Set goals, monitor progress, measure results, refine and repeat.
With any content marketing, it’s important to engage in an adaptable cycle designed to make iterative improvements to content effectiveness. That means based on goals, monitor progress through key performance indicators like blog comments, links, mentions, referred social network traffic, referred search engine traffic and the behaviors of visitors once they arrive on the blog.
The five tips above will help you start your content marketing strategy, but to be truly effective, you will need to continually adapt, change and restructure your social media marketing and monitoring toolbox.
To learn more, download our FREE Business Blogging Tip Sheet.
