Blogging has become a mainstream tool for mHealth businesses to communicate with their clients, customers and influencers. When I consult with a new client, they are usually interested in learning how to create or improve their business blog. The requests for training and consulting on business blogging has become a large part of my business and I don’t see it slowing down — in fact I see it increasing. Businesses are realizing that they can touch and influence their target audiences through a business blog because it’s more personal than a tweet or Facebook post. And speaking for myself, I can say that through my blog I have amplified my visibility and developed new business alliances I would never have had the opportunity to pursue without the blog community. Blogging is no longer just a good idea, it’s a necessity to an overall marketing plan.
I’m always on the alert for ways to improve my blogging effectiveness. Here are five tips from Lee Odden to help you start or build your 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 blog’s content marketing strategy, but to be truly effective, you will need to be agile. Make sure you continually adapt, change and restructure your social media marketing and monitoring.
photo credit: agahran via photo pin cc
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