When you’re a small to medium-sized business, you’ll hear over and over you need a blog. Truth is, you probably do, but not every brand benefits from a blog in the traditional sense. To determine if a blog is a right for your brand, you need to look at the basic work a blog does on a site.
What Does a Blog Really Do?
A blog has a job to inform and educate your visitors and hopefully engage them. If you work in an industry where there are not regular industry advances or technology trends, you might find you don’t have a lot of content. A blog that a brand starts with gusto and then abandons due to lack of content (or time!) looks bad to potential clients researching your product or service and can actually repel them from making a purchase decision. There are things you can do to fill those gaps that will work for promoting your brand without having to constantly come up with new uniquely-written blog posts.
Figure Out Who You Are Posting For One question that often stumps new clients is who their ideal demographic is. That is where having a buyer persona comes into play. When building a buyer persona, you imagine the people who are your customers and ask questions like where do they live? What are their educational backgrounds? What pain points would they be trying to eliminate through the purchase of your product or service? The key is to get very detailed.
Example: Buyer Personal Jane lives in a middle-class home with her second husband and has a blended family with both stepchildren and biological children. She chose to stay home with the kids and now they live on one salary which means she is looking for the best deal and special promotions may be attractive to her. Being a stay-at-home Mom she doesn’t want to spend tons of time researching and prefers key points for whatever she is looking for on a site to be simple to find (this means be sure your webmaster puts filter options in the site navigation).
Figure Out a Posting Schedule It’s exciting to start a blog. Once you commit to a posting schedule, it is vital that you keep it. Nothing, but nothing looks worse than a blog that is gathering dust. When you’re determining a posting schedule, it’s a smart SEO move to use each post to concentrate on both quality, unique information and a single topic. It’s easy to want to repeat every cool aspect of your product or service in each post but that gets boring quickly. Tell your story one post at a time and build up a quality experience for each website visitor.
Figure Out Content Ideas Far in AdvanceOnce you have your buyer personas created, write for those people. Figure out their pain points and answer them in a blog post. Create situations that your brand has the answers for. For example: If your buyer persona Jane loves shopping for shoes online but she wears a very narrow width. Create a blog post about how your site navigation lets shoppers filter search results by size, width or style. This educates, informs and makes sales. Knowing how your ideal audience connects is another important element when you’re building a marketing plan.
What if Content Ideas are Light?You have a few choices if your niche market is so narrow or unique that you don’t have much diversity in content, you have a few choices:
1) Set a publishing schedule for once a week
2) Use your blog as an information tool as well as current events for the company
3) Skip the blog and concentrate your marketing dollars on social media promotion
4) Incorporate holidays into your posting (National Pizza Day or National Smile Day can result in engaging content by showing the team that helps your business run celebrating!)
To wrap it up, not every brand needs a blog, but you should take the time to create buyer personas so you can market the message of your brand with laser precision.
No time to blog or market on social media? Horizon Marketing delivers big-brand marketing assistance to small to medium-sized businesses. Call (310) 734-1493 Ext. 1 now and request your Free Web and SEO analysis.