Getting More Out of Your Corporate Blog

The ways in which your corporate blog can be a play a crucial role in your marketing communications strategy are manifold. It helps you improve search engine presence, projects your organization as a business concern with a customer-driven culture, and gives you a viable platform for enhanced target audience engagement by regularly giving them useful information and having the thought leaders speak to them directly. This element of accessibility  brings you closer to your audience and enables you to share brand stories with them in a decisively direct manner. Basically, while your article marketing and submission efforts merely act to direct traffic to your website, your corporate blog can be so much more by being the online voice of your organization.

Here’s how you can get more out of your corporate blog and get closer to realizing its full potential.

Write your corporate blog in an authentic voice

Brands are built on the bedrock of trust, and there’s no trust without authenticity. Your corporate blog ought to be in a conversational tone without being vetted by PR or legal concerns. Don’t make the mistake of being phony just for the sake of looking cute. For instance, when Dr. Pepper launched a new flavored-milk product called Raging Cow, their blog had a “cow” post random comments about a cross-country trip. It made for some amusing reading, but didn’t really inspire a lot of trust.

The Corporate Blog as a Market Research Tool

Politicians have learnt the value of ‘trial balloons’. An idea is leaked and the public reaction, which can range from appreciative murmurs to cries of outrage, is analyzed to ascertain if it would be safe to proceed. Use your corporate blog to ‘think out loud’, sharing tidbits that are not available elsewhere: it can be anything from discrete information about an in-the-works product or glimpses of a near-future marketing blitz. The comments that come your way provide you with free feedback that reaches you directly without being doctored and without a layer of insulation in between.

Achieve Subject Matter Expert Status with Your Audience

Relevant original content delivered in an authoritative (yet friendly) tone establishes your corporate blog as a trusted and authoritative source among your readers. When this happens, you can expect a fair degree of organic growth in traffic. Apart from your own SEO and off-page optimization efforts that help direct traffic to your blog, your readers act as the brand ambassadors for your corporate blog. Links to relevant posts by your corporate blog are quoted on discussion forums. Readers would ‘digg’ and ‘like’ your posts; they’d maybe even share it on their Facebook walls or tweet about it. This exposes your blog to so many other people who you had never tried to reach out to directly. For that to happen, however, you must have solid, original and irrefutable content on your corporate blog.

So these are some of the points you need to keep in mind for effective brand-oriented blogging. For more on writing the perfect corporate blog, corporate finance, and related corporate news, keep watching this space.