Creating Valuable Blog Posts

Writing engaging blogs as a business can be a difficult artform to perfect, and this part of digital marketing strategy is often ignored for the more buzzy social media platforms that make communicating with potential customers quicker, if not necessarily easier.

However, maintaining an informative blog can be a great source of leads, as well as providing SEO rankings and content that you can then share through your social media channels. It’s difficult to know how and where to start, so we’ve put together some top tips on how to craft valuable blog posts that your audience will actually want to read.

1. Understand the Audience

As with anything digital marketing-related, you need to know your audience in order to produce content for them. Start with your brand persona – are you friendly, authoritative, cheeky or none of the above? What do your customers expect from you, and what are they used to seeing from your existing social media channels? Don’t go for a drastic change of tone just because it’s a blog not Twitter – keep it consistent.

2. Don’t Push Sales

Yes, your blog is a great source of leads and yes, it exists to tell people about your company and your product BUT you don’t want to use this particular platform to push sales pleas at people. You’re blogging, not begging. Instead, focus on creating content that adds value to your company/product through helping potential customers with their problem. Showing that you know what you’re talking about will convert the customer from “potential” to “convert”.

3. Keep It Concise

No one likes to read reams and reams of information, particularly when they are searching for a solution to a problem or specific need. Keep paragraphs short, tone concise and language simple – scannable blogs tend to be more successful than wordy, long-winded ones.

4. Types of Posts

There are a few fairly foolproof blog “types” that will at least help to get you started. Everyone loves a list-based post as they are quick and easy to digest, how-to posts share valuable information with the audience, and curated content from other sources will keep audiences interested.

5. Include a Call-To-Action              

A CTA, or call-to-action, is a suggestion for the reader as to what they should do next. If you want more subscribers, ask them to subscribe, or if you want them to read more of your content, link them to something related. Same goes if you want more views on your website – include a link to tell them where to go next.