As a business, you should always be clear about why you are pursuing a marketing tactic like blogging. How does it fit into your marketing strategy and, ultimately, help you achieve your business goals?
These overarching considerations will influence many decisions about your blog: What themes and topics will you cover? How much resource will you put towards it (budget and/or in-house time)? How will you publish and push it out into the ether? Who is it for? Who will write it (we can help here, obviously)?
You may be considering, or already writing, a blog as part of a content marketing strategy – content marketing is one of the most common reasons why businesses do blog.
More often than not, this is a dance between a business and their target audience, with one “partner” sharing knowledge and expertise for free, and the other giving attention, building up trust and goodwill, and, when the time is right, buying from you.
The importance of your blog messaging
There are a number of things to get right with your blog messaging, then, to satisfy your target audience in this dance.
- Credibility – You need to convey the level of knowledge that they would expect from an expert. Crucially, in addition to this, your writing should be of a corresponding quality. Spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, repetition, ungainly paragraphs and sentences, inconsistencies of style will all detract from your credibility. If you enjoy the writing but need help with quality assurance, we can help you with our editing and proof-reading services.
- Appropriate levels of call to action (CTA) – Content marketing blogs will generally not be too pushy for sales, although it is your prerogative to choose your level. The majority of the blog will be exploring a topic relevant to your target audience, with a brief message at the end saying you can help them with this if/when they need it. You may have other CTAs within the body copy or on the page but separate, too; depending on how you want to balance it.
- Accessibility – It is important to pitch your blog at the right level: not dwell on basics that the target audience will already know like the back of their hand; not dive straight into the complicated stuff that they cannot make head nor tail of. When editing, part of my assessment will consider both the logical structure and pace of an article when considering how accessible it is to readers.
Don’t give away all your secrets
Now we come to the main takeaway from this blog, something else to judge correctly in this dance between business and target audience. You want your blog to be useful… but not too useful.
In other words, you certainly don’t want your blog messaging to be banal; but neither, most of the time, do you want to give them so much information that you make yourself redundant or, at least, pass off this impression.
Show you know your stuff, talk about new and established things in your industry, stress the importance of rules, processes, services; but leave space for them to need your help, too.
Company blogging services
We have written countless blogs for clients over the years at On Point Copywriting. We also love having those initial conversations defining what you are trying to achieve and exploring matters like tone of voice and target audience; or if you’ve done all that yourself and just want your writing checked, we also love running the rule over blogs that clients write themselves.
If you would like assistance with any aspect of your blog, whether just starting out, or it is long established, please get in touch. We have a service level for every need.
