Budget constraints, staffing and strategy – these are just some of the differences that distinguish small business blogs from corporate blogging. Nonetheless, if you’re using the wrong blog strategy for your company, you’re not going to get the results you want, no matter how much money and resources you work into the mix. Keep reading to learn how to take advantage and capitalize on the inherent differences between small business blogs and corporate blogs.
Small Business Blogging
Unlike large corporations, small businesses typically operate in a niche market, selling only a few products or services to a highly targeted audience. As a result, blogs for small businesses require a much different blog strategy. If you’re just starting to dip your toes into the ever-growing pool of inbound marketing, here are a few pointers.
While blogging may seem like a time-consuming, resource-heavy task, you don’t need a large team to build an effective blog strategy that draws in organic traffic and amplifies your brand story.
The first step to building a small business blog is to determine your objectives. What do you want out of your blog – more followers on social media? To drive conversion? To pull in more organic traffic? While you’ll most likely be writing a number of blogs for customers at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, which is generally about attracting visitors to your site, it’s important to blog for the consideration and decision stages as well.
Once you’ve set clear goals, you’ll need to outline your target audience through buyer personas. To learn more about crafting effective customer profiles for your company, check out our blog post on understanding buyer personas.
When that’s all squared away and you’ve determined which types of buyers you plan on targeting, you’ll need to set a blogging schedule that gets you ranking on the SERP. Take into consideration who your competitors are and how often they are blogging.
The final step is to brainstorm good blog topics. So what should a small business, like yours, blog about? The first rule of thumb is to stay on topic. If you own a restaurant, you don’t want to talk about the latest fashion trends – unless, of course, you can find a way to spin the topic to suit your business. Focus on writing about your customers, products or services, successes, failures and lessons learned.
The core of your blog strategy should always be to inform your audience, whether they’ve just stumbled on your site or are loyal, long-time customers.
Business Blogs for Corporations
According to a 2016 study conducted by UMass, 36% of Fortune 500 companies have blogs, which is up from 23% in 2010. This increase seems to indicate that even large corporations stand to benefit from blogging. Here are a few tips for creating business blogs that attract more readers and command greater results.
If you’re blogging for a large company, you likely have a built-in base of customers that already know your products, services and brand, and instead of targeting a niche market, you’re probably directing content at a large segment of the general population. As such, it’s absolutely essential to create posts for different buyers at varying stages of the buyer’s journey. You’ll almost certainly have more buyer personas than a small business, and that’s okay. Just try and narrow down your customer profiles, so you don’t inundate your blog with too many personas.
Corporations often have a wide variety of products and services that make blogging seem like an impossible task. But it really just means you have more to talk about, and hopefully, you have a team of content marketers on hand who can help implement, amend and improve your blog strategy. However, with a bigger pool of content writers to pull from, you’ll need to create style guides to keep everyone on the same page when it comes to grammar, punctuation, tone and abbreviations.
Even with a team of qualified content writers, corporate bloggers face their own unique set of challenges, including humanizing the organization and avoiding blatant advertising at all costs. Blogs are meant to be informative and personable, which is where small businesses excel thanks to their naturally local, down-to-earth appeal. Make it a goal to bring a conversational tone and style to your blog posts in order to maximize engagement and keep readers on your site. If your blog post sound like press releases, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Remember Blogging Basics When Developing Your Blog Strategy
In the end, while there are many differences between small business blogs and corporate blogs, both should be useful and informative to the intended audience. They should also rely on data-driven customer profiles and utilize the buyer’s journey to ensure your company is reaching the right audience at the right time.
Need help getting started? Consider Virtucom Group’s monthly content subscription packages. We’ll tailor a blog strategy that’s right for your small business or corporation, and deliver a consistent stream of blog content to help boost your search engine rankings.
About Virtucom Group
Consistent business blogging yields results – more clicks, more subscribers and – ultimately – more conversions. Whether you’re writing an automotive blog, an accounting blog, a healthcare blog or a home renovation blog, blogging for business and content development are useful for any industry. Follow the content writers at the Virtucom Group blog as they share digital marketing tips and discuss website content writing services that can optimize your business blog.
