Launching a corporate blog from scratch can be a daunting business, particularly if you don’t have a large email list of customers and prospects to draw on. Competition is fierce and a brief online research of competitors’ blogs can shake even the most experienced marketers’ confidence.
How can we come up with compelling content? Once we do, how can we entice our target audience to bother reading it? When e-learning provider Articulate launched its Rapid E-Learning Blog , it attracted 6,312 subscribers in the 24 hours following launch, and a total of 8,500 were subscribed in less than one week. What did they do to get it so right, and how can one apply this learning to any blog strategy?
1. Develop concrete positioning
It’s absolutely essential to determine the precise position of your business blog within the market well before launching. Say, for example, that your company sells HR software. The goal for your blog may be to demonstrate the value of software as an HR efficiency tool, to offer useful content related to the HR sector or to position your executives as thought leaders. Whatever the exact purpose, the blog should always set out to offer value to existing and potential customers, while differentiating itself from competitors. We’ve yet to encounter a successful blog that sets out to directly sell its product or service.
2. Prepare content
Most businesses these days are curators of content to some extent, even if just on their own websites. Perhaps you publish white papers, host webinars with recognised industry leaders or produce a customer magazine. Chances are that you create email newsletters to keep customers and prospects up to date with products, offers and events.
Consider stockpiling a bank of cornerstone content to seduce first-time visitors to your site. The blog series offering informative, practical content is a tried and tested way to lure readers back for more. This five-part series on what to pack for a cruise from travel retailer Minimus is a perfect example of useful, targeted content.
3. Offer an incentive
Since your blog’s positioning should be centred around offering readers something for nothing, preferably something that caters to their information needs, start as you mean to go on with an incentive at launch. Consider offering a free ebook which could become the focus of promotional activity for your blog launch. Include valuable, unique and original content, including practical tips that your reader can start applying immediately. This ebook by language educator Dr Sarah Eaton was downloaded more than 5,000 times from her website alone, which can almost certainly be largely attributed to its practical classroom activities section.
4. Use email
Email is often underrated by social media enthusiasts, but this old faithful medium can play a useful supporting role to blog activity. With your ebook ready to launch, construct a concise email, preferably in HTML and with an enticing, clear image representing the ebook. Include a clear call to action to click through to your landing page – here you can summarise the ebook content, add a call to action to subscribe to the blog and an email form.
5. Deliver blogs to your readers
We recommend posting a status update with a link to your blog on chosen social media channels whenever you publish a new article. During the launch period, you might consider using an email service such as Feedburner to power email subscriptions, so that new blog posts are sent automatically to subscribers.
6. Keep the momentum going
With promotional activity in place and excellent cornerstone content ready to roll, the blog launch should go smoothly and successfully. This may feel like mission complete, but in fact the hard work has only just begun. The beauty of being perceived as an authority in your sector is that clients, customers and prospects will keep coming back to your business blog hungry for more practical tips and information. Whether you continue to create blogs in-house or opt to outsource content writing, you now have a responsibility to deliver a continuous stream of up-to-the-minute blog posts. Good luck!
