Is your company thinking about launching a company blog? It’s a big decision. On the plus side, a blog can do wonders for SEO, lead generation, building brand image and strengthening customer engagement. On the negative side, a blog can be time-consuming, hard to maintain and divert resources from other marketing campaigns.
5 Questions to Ask Before Launching Your Blog
- Do we have talented writers available? Blogging requires a lot of writing, so you are going to need on-staff or agency writers at the ready.
- Do our prospects and customers read blogs? If your target audience doesn’t spend much time reading blogs or combing the Internet for business information, your blog may not do enough for lead generation to make the effort worthwhile.
- Will blogging help our SEO campaign? A company blog can benefit SEO in a number of ways, but it can also drain resources from other, better SEO tactics. Go over the SEO implications of a blog carefully with your agency before pulling the trigger.
- What is our content strategy? Company blogs get poor results when content is inward-focused and/or unimaginative. What are we going to write about? Why will potential customers be interested in reading it? How will we get blog subscribers into our conversion funnel? If you don’t have clear answers to these questions, you’re not yet ready to start a blog.
- How will we know if our blog is successful? Like any other marketing program, a blog must have KPIs. Useful metrics for blogs include:
- Number of subscribers (RSS and email)
- Number of page views
- Time on page
- Organic traffic
- Referred traffic
- Number of comments
- Number of conversions (form submissions and phone-in)
- Number of social shares
- Quality of social shares
- Organic search visibility of blog content
Considering a company blog? If you’d like to discuss options, please contact us now.