You likely already know the basic idea behind blogging for your brand: Create content that draws readers (and potential customers) to your website, educate them on topics that fall within your area of expertise and, eventually, establish your business as a trusted authority in your industry. While you are doing that, you are greatly enhancing your chances of turning your readers into customers. But for many brands, while in-house industry expertise may be plentiful, experience creating content is quite limited (if any exists at all) — making all of these strategic initiatives and goals for the blog much easier said than done.
By following some tried-and-true guidelines from the experienced content creators at The Brandon Agency, though, your brand can create compelling, high-quality content that attracts readers and followers to your blog, maintains their interest, and leads them along the path to purchase. Consider these 10 tips from our content team on creating content that moves the needle for your brand:
1. Consider your audience
Before you start writing anything, give careful consideration to just who your target audience is, as well as to what its members would be interested in hearing about. Choose topics that are likely to spur interest among these readers, and on which your business can provide highly informed and even expert insights.
One obvious set of topics here includes subject matter related to your business’s offerings and how to use them, as well as leading topics of interest in your industry. Local events and company news are also items that are typically worthy of attention. And for additional subject-matter ideas, it can be helpful to survey the landscape in your industry for interesting topics, then put your own spin on any especially compelling ones that jump out at you.
2. Include keyword-heavy headlines and copy
A great way to get your blog articles noticed by search engines is by strategically including keywords in your headline and copy. It’s a great SEO strategy and does your readers a favor, as well, helping to clue them in on the primary focus of your blog article right away. For help determining some of the best keywords to include in your articles, free online tools like Google Keyword Planner can be a great resource to leverage.
3. Create captivating intros
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Especially when it comes to online content, most readers start by scanning, and they’ll quickly go elsewhere if they aren’t hooked quickly. So, to capture and keep your readers’ attention, it’s critical to get off to a good start. Work and re-work your article opening as needed to ensure that you’ve crafted a compelling intro that conveys your topic, plus sparks and retains readers’ interest. One powerful way to do this is to lead off with an eye-catching statistic related to your subject matter. Another is to share a relatable scenario that encapsulates your topic. Whatever your approach, keep the need to capture attention in mind.
4. … and get to the point quickly
While you don’t always have to get to the point right away, you should make great effort to avoid “burying the lead” — ensuring that you get to your main subject matter/talking points relatively quickly. Readers today are infamously impatient, so it’s critical that your target doesn’t have to dig too deep to discover that your article contains the information they want. As such, it’s best to start addressing your main topic within the first few sentences of your copy.
5. Convey a casual tone (in most cases)
For most businesses, blog articles should be written in a casual, conversational tone, which can help pull readers in and get them more engaged with the topic at hand. This helps readers feel more like you’re speaking with them one-to-one to help them solve a problem or sharpen their skills and knowledge — and it can also help your brand create a more loyal readership. (Of course, exceptions should be made for any articles discussing serious and somber matters, for which a casual tone might be off-putting.)
6. Avoid large, gray copy blocks
Continuing on the “infamously impatient” theme discussed above, when reading online, many consumers are easily intimidated (and/or bored) by huge, gray blocks of text. As such, in most cases, the internet is simply not the proper venue for lengthy, textbook-like articles. But even longer blog articles can be made much more digestible by finding ways to break the copy up into shorter, simpler, more scannable sections. A couple of ways to accomplish this when writing include keeping paragraphs short, which helps create more white space within an article, and employing subheads, which help to both break copy up and guide readers on the specific topics being discussed throughout the article.
7. Break it up with bullet points
Another great way to break up copy and make a blog article more visually appealing is to use bullet points anytime your article includes a list. Not only do bulleted entries help keep the sections of information conveyed more concise and easier to scan, but they can also help readers to better comprehend and retain the points being made in your article. Further, they can be used to help emphasize the various points being made in your article with bolded lead-in copy for each bulleted section.
8. Include images
Visuals serve as another great way to break up large blocks of copy. In fact, they may be the best of all options available for accomplishing this goal, as they can also serve as a point of entry into a blog article that captures readers’ attention and pulls them in — making any otherwise less-than-exciting post more interesting and engaging. They can also help to illustrate concepts and ideas that are difficult to explain in words, making their inclusion especially helpful to reader comprehension and article effectiveness.
9. Edit, then edit again
Of course, every blog article should be as free of grammatical and spelling errors as possible when it goes live. But another top editing goal should be to eliminate all unnecessary words (and even unneeded sentences and paragraphs) so that the final version is as short and to the point as possible, all while still conveying the desired information and brand messaging. By reading and re-reading your posts until they’re in optimal form, you’ll be able to trim the fat and publish a blog article that is as brief and polished as possible. It’s also helpful to have people other than yourself review your articles, as it can often be challenging to effectively edit your own work.
10. Conclude with a strong call to action
Lastly, the majority of your brand’s blog articles should end with a clearly stated call to action that prompts a specific desired response from your readers. This can help drive the ultimate overall goal of your entire content strategy: conversion. And whether the strategic goal at hand is to get readers to share your article, comment on it, follow your brand on social media or explore your business’s products and/or services, you’re much more likely to spur the action you’d like to see your readers take if you ask them to take it. Or, you can at least gently nudge them in that direction.
Could your brand use some expert help in creating high-quality content that attracts more readers to your blog and more customers to your business? At The Brandon Agency, our team of certified brand strategists and data-driven marketing professionals has a wealth of content-creation experience — and we know how to get consumers’ attention and keep it. Further, TBA’s fully integrated marketing firm can cover the full spectrum of your brand’s marketing needs, including SEO, PPC, SEM, analytics, email marketing, social media, brand strategy, web design, creative, media, e-commerce, conversion rate optimization and more. To get started with help ranging from a simple website analysis to a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost the performance of all of your marketing campaigns, contact us today.