OFF-MUTE 🔈
🎶 Content is the soul of a good marketing program.
📖💡Why? Storytelling is how people connect with ideas.
✨ And blogging is one of our favorite community-building methods (for ourselves and for our clients).
🪐 We like to think of blogs and other forms of web copy as the nucleus of a marketing communications strategy. This central content hub on your site is full of trackable links and key messages that you can plot across your owned media universe—telling a cohesive story about who you are and what you do via social posts, bylined articles, etc.
💻 For years now, the Inklings blog has been our primary content marketing channel. It reflects our smarts, our values and our culture. And now it also fuels this weekly thought leadership newsletter.
👑 When executed properly, a blog can help build brand awareness and authority, increase website traffic, engage potential customers or leads, and amplify content and media coverage to new audiences.
🚀 If you’re thinking about launching a blog or refreshing an old one, here’s what you should consider:
☑️ Design your blog strategy with your business goals and key audience(s) in mind. Confirming the objectives at the outset helps to keep priorities in check as you launch and build your blog. This is also a good time to determine what themes the blog will cover and who will be authoring the content, as well as what the output will be on your social channels. Pro tip: aim for 3-5 content themes that align with your thought leadership pillars. Use this checklist to get started.
☑️ Do keyword research before you start writing. Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ahrefs or SEMRush to understand how people are searching for answers related to your business. Focus on keywords and phrases that people search for often but aren’t too competitive. Pro tip: Use the most important keywords in the headline and early in the post. Watch this helpful video that demonstrates how to set up Keyword Planner for free (without having to pay for Google ads).
☑️ Create quality content. Start off with an audit to determine what content exists and can be repurposed for the blog, then map out the posts using an editorial calendar. Fill in the gaps with new, timely content tied to your thought leadership pillars (and business goals) for a good mix. Remember: blog posts don’t need to be all text. For example, you can write a short intro and embed a video or go with a listicle format using social posts. Pro tip: If you’re starting from scratch, have 3-5 blog posts drafted and approved ahead of the launch.
☑️ Invite outside perspectives. Consider inviting guest contributors from outside the company to write for the blog. Or develop an interview series that runs once a month where you feature thought leaders outside of your organization to offer a different perspective. Our Changemakers Series from last year is a good example. The best part? This content strategy builds your audience beyond your existing network.
☑️ Don’t overlook the meta description. Remember, this will auto-populate on the social post and you don’t want it to be repetitive with the headline. Pro tip: Before you publish your blog post, draft three captions for Twitter. Use the best one for the blog meta description and save the rest for the actual social posts.
☑️ Get creative with design. The feature image is just as important as the headline. For every post, you also need social graphics (think of them like the thumbnail). Stick to your branding guidelines to ensure your visual game is strong. Use Canva’s templates if you don’t have a designer on staff and consider an employee photography contest to build up a digital library of original photos. Inkhouse is testing this idea this fall!
☑️ Choose your platform. Ensure that navigating between your blog and the main website is seamless for visitors, and uploading new content is simple enough for your marketing team to handle.
☑️ Promote, promote, promote! An integrated, cross-channel strategy drives visitors to your blog. Encourage blog authors and employees to share posts with their networks. Add a link to your new post in your email signature. Send a roundup of recent content to your email subscribers. And if your blog posts mention a customer or partner, be sure to send an email with a link to the blog post with suggested social shares (and don’t forget to tag sources in social posts).
☑️ Measure what works and what doesn’t. If you aren’t looking at the analytics behind your blog, such as visits, most popular/visited posts, and time spent on the blog, you won’t understand how to keep the momentum heading in the right direction. Monitor, analyze, test, revise and continue creating the kinds of posts that work.
☑️ Play the long game. Blogging takes time to build ranking authority, but we can tell you it’s worth the effort.