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Your website should offer a place to develop a community with your customers and clients.
It should bring awareness to the level of expertise of your employees and leaders.
Your company website should gather feedback from leads and customers.
A company blog can serve as the "hub" for social media campaigns.
Using a blog is an effective method to incorporate all of these features into your websites.
However, applied incorrectly, the power of blogging can also have a negative impact on your online corporate image.
There are a few mistakes commonly made by corporate bloggers that you can avoid and give yourself and your company a marketing advantage from the word, "go!" Jump Right In One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a company when beginning any new phase, step or innovation is to jump in without a plan or a strategy.
Blogging, while technically simple to set up, is not an easy task to undertake.
I'm sure most writers will agree, making sure you keep content flowing is challenging.
So, to when writing your plan, ask yourself:
- Will Blogging Help My Business? Blogging is social, so if your company is not social, it may be a wasted effort.
Someone has to keep the content frequently updated.
Be sure you have the resources in place.
Further, there will be negative and challenging comments and questions.
Your company and blogger must be willing and capable of handling them. - What are the Goals and Objectives? Knowing what you would like to communicate to your audience, and the purpose of the content will drive what you write about, who writes it and how it is received.
Is your goal to increase sales? Are you looking to connect with others in the industry?
- Your blog is about your company, but simply focusing on company news can erode your brand's personality and make your blog appear to be simple advertising rather than a platform for engaging your readers.
- Your audience has needs.
You want to reach those needs through the information presented.
If you only use technical and industry jargon, you will lose a valuable part of your readership.
Always consider what is valuable to your readers and keep your focus on them, rather than just commenting on what you are already doing.
Linking to other sites, citing your sources and linking back to other posts and website pages:
- Gives credibility to your site
- Adds narrative to your content
- Builds traffic and community
Citing your sources is ethical and in many cases illegal to ignore.
You can also generate reciprocal links using this method and build high PageRank.
Never Fake it! Clients and customers want authenticity.
The want to get to know your company and your brand, otherwise they would not visit your blog.
There are a few tips to remember when building:
- Impersonations don't work! The only people who can write honestly and richly about your company are people who are intimately familiar with it.
Don't hire someone to impersonate your writing.
While you may outsource, labeling that content as from the CEO is not a great idea if the writing doesn't match the CEO's personality and tone. - Personal tone does not equal personal matters.
A corporate blog is not the place to write about your dog, your favorite music videos or your cousin's wedding.
Move those items to your personal blog or your own Facebook page. - Write about relational items.
Don't write outside the scope of your company and industry.
While social media is a hot topic, if you are a manufacturing company, including posts about it may not be relevant to your customers and readers.
Find a blog that you enjoy, follow it for a while and use it to help you build your strategy.
Take your time, be consistent and authentic, and build a subscriber base of loyal brand evangelists by avoiding critical mistakes in creating your company blog.
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