Create a Blog That Shines a Light on Your Brand | Social Joey
As social media marketers, we can tell you all about the benefits of social media marketing. You’re meeting your audience where they are—on social media, obviously!
You’re able to share details and insights about your product and services that pop up right in their newsfeed sometimes. Your customer service team can quickly engage with customers and potential customers through social media posts and direct messages. You can use databases of information to direct your posts to those who align with your mission and fit your target persona.
And sometimes your posts can go viral! Then you’re not only capturing the attention of those who have followed your page (or those targeted through ads or promoted posts), but also getting in front of many people who might not know about your brand.
But there’s an ultimate goal when it comes to social media marketing: You want to push folks to take an action. Most often, that action at least starts by visiting your website.
How can you build out a website that people will want to visit and find useful? A blog is an excellent place to begin.
Well, OK. You know a blog can be a great resource for a business. But where do you even start? Read on as our Social Joey team breaks down some basics for you!
Building a Blog That Drives Success
Whether you’re building a new business from the ground up, starting up a new franchise location, or simply saw the light about blogging’s benefits, now’s as good a time as any to dive in.
Here are our suggestions for where to begin:
Determine Where Your Blog Will Live
This is a bit of housekeeping, but it’s important housekeeping! Before you even begin creating the content, you need to know where your blog will exist on the World Wide Web.
Why do you need to know that in advance? Well, it determines several things about how you write. You’ll want to talk with your web developer or IT team about the backend of your website and whether it can host a blog.
If so, get the details about what a blog will look like—what structure does it take?
If not, you’ll want to look into websites specifically designed to host blogs.
Knowing the details about what your blog will look like, including font selection, headings, and image placement, will help guide you during the content creation phase.
Brainstorm Blog Topics
When you’re beginning a blog from scratch, the sky truly is the limit. You can determine exactly what you’d like to talk about in blog articles.
But there’s a really important thing to keep in mind—we frequently recommend that you do not bombard your customers and potential customers with your brand over and over again. In social media marketing, it’s optimal to offer your audience helpful, useful, and relevant information that’s engaging, sprinkling in occasional details about your product or service.
That also holds true for your blog. If your blog articles are solely about your product or service, it’s unlikely that many people will read past the first blog.
Instead, determine your brand’s niche. What can you speak about with a level of expertise? If you’re in the cleaning business, for example, fill the pages of your blog with articles about cleaning tips, organization advice, how-tos about removing stains, and content about the benefits of decluttering.
If you’re in the healthcare space, provide content that’s educational in nature—and though it may seem counterintuitive, help your readers understand how to stay healthy and well. In the long run, you want your blogs to establish your brand as the expert in the industry, making readers more likely to turn to you when they need your services.
Tl;dr version? Go soft sell, rather than hard.
Nail Down Your Brand’s Tone and Voice
You may already have a defined tone and voice for your business. That’s especially true if you are part of a franchise organization, where those details are defined for you.
But if you’re really taking the first dive into creating in-depth content for your business, this may be new to you. You want to establish how you’re going to communicate in your blog from day 1.
That means nailing down both your brand’s voice and your blog’s tone. Note that we attached voice to your brand and tone to the blog itself.
That’s because they’re two different things. We wrote about the topic in this blog back in 2020, but here’s a quick recap: Voice is your brand’s personality, while the tone is the inflection you’re giving your voice in a specific type or piece of content.
The voice stays the same for all content your business puts out, including your website, printed materials, social media posts, and blogs. Tone, on the other hand, can vary by type of content, as well as your audience and the message you’re relaying.
The biggest thing is that you’ll want to be consistent. Our best advice (and what we strive for in this blog) is to strike a friendly, warm, and conversational tone in blogs.
Decide on a Strategy for Getting Your Blog Seen
You can write the most amazing blogs ever, but if no one ever reads them, it’s rather like the tree falling in the woods. When you’re starting up a blog for your business, decide on a strategy to guide how you’re going to get your blog articles out there.
There are two main formats you may want to follow:
Write for voice search. If you choose this option, you will write blogs in a very specific format. You will essentially pick out questions that those in your audience might ask Siri about topics related to your area of expertise.
Those questions will form the crux of your blogs. You will use one as the headline, then use other related questions in the subheadings. You answer those questions within the body of the text.
The entire blog is written in short, easy-to-understand sentences, with entire sections written in a bulleted format that can easily be read out by Siri.
Write for SEO. If you choose this option, you’re pretty much free to write as you’d like. The key is to infuse the blog with a chosen keyword in strategic places, including the headline, the meta title, the meta description, some of the subheadings, and the body copy.
This is what’s known as search engine optimization—meaning it is designed to catch the Google algorithm’s eye. When people search for information related to that chosen keyword, you want them to be able to find you.
This style of blogging can also be melded with the voice search format above by simply ensuring that the questions being used have a keyword in them.
Once you’ve taken all the steps above, you’re ready to get to writing! Let us do the heavy lifting—we can help you with blogging and social media. Get in touch today to get your first blog in the works.