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"One of the biggest mistakes that is made is when people think that they are not going to have to give back. Blogs become sources of "Hey, look at me!" A blog should be 70% informative and helpful and 30% advertising at a maximum. When you create that kind of content, you will be followed and then become an influencer."
Another opinion reinforces the same idea – it’s from Matt Southern in Search Engine Journal:
"After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources? When writing content for people, you should help them answer a question or resolve a concern that led them to find your website in the first place."
Moral? When you build your brand blog as a “magazine publisher” would, make sure to include “helpful information” in every blog post.
Have you ever considered your blog posts as separate gateways into your brand space? Very few marketers do. They see their web home page as the main gateway from which visitors may enter.
But hear this: every single blog post, indexed and ranked by Google, acts as one more gateway into your website. Over time, as you do more keyword research and create more blog posts, you will generate more and more ways through which people can enter your brand site. You will beckon traffic from many different angles.
What’s the achievement you will gain for your brand from this? For starters, you will draw in people of varied interests and pain points that your brand can solve. The more pain points you can identify that your brand can solve, the more your brand value to your various audience segments grows.
Secondly, and more importantly, when you ensure that every one of your blog posts has substantial topic depth and breadth and measurable brand authority to engage readers, you will encourage them to share your post because it’s rich with value. You will thus create opportunities for more new readers’ to enter your site through that gateway. Further, if you create varied social posts linking back to each of your blog posts, you will create even more gateways into your brand space.
I first realized the power of dictating a blog when I learned an SEO course from Jon Morrow, a copywriting guru, but unfortunately paralyzed from the neck down. Yet he has written millions of words as ebooks and articles just by voice typing! Researching this idea further (to get more speed into my blogging), I came across this outstanding video below from Steve Dotto of DottoTech.
Watch the whole video (it’s pretty short but engaging) and learn how to get blogs done at 10X speed!
When you write content for the rest of your website pages, you do have to keep your target audience in mind, as you explain to them about your business, your mission, your products, your other resources, and your contact information.
But your website copy may not require as deep an insight into your target audiences as writing a whole spate of brand-supportive blog posts may require. Blog posts work best when they are aids to solving customer problems. To solve customer problems, you have to know their psychology intimately.
Starting a brand blog thus forces you to acquire a far more intense understanding of your target audiences, their many segments, and their interests and needs. Brand blogs that succeed in generating a lot of traffic are the ones that reflect a profound knowledge of audiences’ tastes, preferences, emotions, triggers, and buying behaviors.
With every new blog post your brand creates, you get a fresh perspective or insight about your audience, depending on the topic of the blog post and the angle of approach you plan to take. This is why brands that blog a lot have a constant finger on the pulse of their audiences − and they grow to know more and more about what makes their audiences tick.
We have mentioned in our article (above) that customer surveys are a great way to get audience insights. But here’s the fact researchers rue: you need to understand customer psychology even to send out surveys that get the truth from them! The video below from Qualaroo teaches you how to structure and handle surveys to get the most from your audience research …
Watch this video because researchers have their own way of getting customers to tell the truth during surveys. You absolutely need to learn their techniques!
Most entrepreneurs these days understand that blogging is unbeatable as a tactic to increase brand visibility and authority. Unlike a short social post, a blog gives you plenty of room to include words and images that showcase your thought leadership and domain expertise in your niche.
Some marketers think, “Why should my blog posts be so long − and why does Google value such long posts − when readers’ attention spans are so poor, and they hardly read? They skim through posts!” The answer is that even if readers don’t read everything you write, they get the gist from your headlines and sub-headings. But the very presence of so many words of quality content suggests to them that your brand has a lot to say for itself.
Content depth in blog posts is reassuring to readers as a criterion for judging your brand’s knowledge and mastery of its domain. When you thus showcase your brand’s “expert status,” you build trust.
Trust is what begets sales in the online world. In the WebSphere, we are all strangers to each other, and every brand big or small is on a level playing field. Whatever your brand size, to succeed you need visibility, credibility, and trust. That’s the only way any brand can hope to generate sales.
I discovered this wonderful infographic below from Newsvoir.com that demonstrates how central brand visibility is to all other benefits of blogging – such as building authority, trust, and sales. The infographic shows how many simple ways there are to increase brand visibility, and many of these suggestions revolve around blogging and putting out quality content in various forms.
As the second point on this diagram illustrates, ensure consistency of content and post frequently!
Blogging is the exact opposite of advertising when it comes to brand marketing. In advertising, you push the brands into public view in a way your audiences cannot avoid seeing them. You hard sell the qualities of your brands, whether or not your audience is ready to hear all this spiel.
In this kind of “interruptive and intrusive” selling, you show no courtesy to the readiness of the target audience to receive your messages. This is why audiences online have been eager to enjoy “seller-less” self-paced product information gathering.
They’d rather have the seller disappear while they complete nearly 80% of their buying journeys − and may only want seller intervention should something go wrong in the ultimate choosing and buying.
Marketers who understand this behavior of online audiences know that they are subtly pushing back against the old method of unwanted advertising, pressurizing them to buy when they are not ready. Blogging is the best way to give your target audiences all the information they need, which they can consume in a self-paced way before they are prepared to buy. This is seen as genuine caring.
Quuu has a great infographic on five simple points to follow to avoid your blog being perceived as too pushy and un-classy. The Quuu philosophy: First, you must have something worth selling. Second, people love to buy, but they hate to be sold to. Third, standing out doesn’t mean shouting about how great you are. It’s the opposite.
The last point here works for me every time. Give away something free, and people will feel they have to reciprocate your gesture by giving you their business!
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Empathy is not just about being on a common wavelength with your customers. Genuine empathy is the ability to handle a multilevel synchronization of your psyche as a brand marketer with your potential customer’s mind.
Experts believe in three levels of empathy.
At its basic level, we have “cognitive empathy,” where we know how the other person (the customer) feels and what they might think. At the next level, we have “emotional empathy,” i.e., when we physically feel what customers feel, as though their emotions were contagious. The third level is “compassionate empathy,” where we can convey the idea that “we’re all connected” and reinforce the idea that we are trustworthy brands.
Brands must have the skills to exhibit all three levels of empathy to resonate with their customers. Remember, your customers are most reassured when your blog post matches their comfort level with the level of empathy your brand shows – no more and no less. Blogging helps marketers offer readers the exact level of empathy that matches their maturing familiarity with their audiences.
Dr. Paul Ekman was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine and ranked fifteenth among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century. He is a person to listen to when you want to understand how to implement ideas like empathy, compassion, and understanding. He has a way of simplifying these heavy emotions into lay language.
Most people suffer from vague knowledge of what these words mean without being able to convert these into practices. So, watch!
It used to be said that converting buyers is hard unless you touch prospective customers at least 7 times. These days, with all the competition and surfeit of blog posts around us, it takes as many as 12 touches to convert customers – or so the experts say.
What it all boils down to, for a serious brand blogger, is that unless you make visiting your site a natural habit for customer prospects, it’s going to be tough to build enough trust in your brand. The more people return to your site to see and read your new blog posts and slowly increment their faith in you, you will not be able to generate the sales levels you desire.
How do you get more people to revisit your site and read more on your blog? With every blog post you write, build in a mechanism for people to want to subscribe to your mailing list … and then send them weekly follow-up emails or newsletters listing the attractions of the new posts on your blog.
Making your site a regular go-to resource, and creating a fresh crop of blog posts beckoning your captured mailing list subscribers every week, is a no-fail plan. I do it. I succeed with it. That’s why I recommend it.
You may have come across a YouTube Channel called Madeleine Blogs. It’s by the same Madeleine who owns the website CappuchinoAndFashion.com. Her claim to fame. Without AI tools, she can write 3000 words blog posts in 1 hour. Since we all know that the more new blogs you write, the more your online business succeeds, blogging at speed is a hack you need to have in your arsenal.
So, go ahead and watch Madeleine give you her tricks of the trade. I love some of the points she makes, and I have even implemented them to drive up my blogging speed.
There’s a secret that some brand bloggers know that others don’t. People love to mingle and congregate with others online to make friends.
The content you create can become the center of such community hubs where people of common interests can share ideas and woes and find solutions. If your blog has a vast archive of posts on a particular topic of interest to a target segment, people will come for the content but stay for the company.
Several brands have successfully built substantial fan bases by developing communities where people congregate for the topic − and then begin to enjoy the company of similar others so much that it’s hard to leave the group. To build a brand community, create a free membership scheme to which people can subscribe. It’s just a way to get them to feel like they’ve entered an exclusive portal where they can find excellent content and actively engaged people like themselves.
I would even go so far as to say blogging for your brand must include this “community-building goal.” Not only will your brand community become full of trust and bonding, but it may also give you loads of new ideas for blog posts and products you can create. It can become your brainstorming group. Trust and bonding go hand in hand with more significant sales.
Brandata is a company dedicated to the concept of brand relationships. Part of that is building a brand community that can accelerate your brand growth. In this video below, Brandata asked themselves. “How do you build a brand community with real connection?” They got their answers via a chat with Danielle Letayf, founder of Badassery, a professional community for rising leaders.
Danielle has shared her thoughts which in turn should set you thinking. Check it out!
As we said at the outset, brand blogging has to identify the target audience’s pain points and offer helpful solutions. So, at the end of every blog post, it’s perfectly okay for a brand to subtly say, “We’ve given you many possible solutions, but if you still need help, our offering can give you a stronger and surer answer to your problem.”
Create a CTA (Call-To-Action) that includes a button people can click to set up a free Zoom chat or a telephonic one-to-one “no-obligations” conversation with you.
A blog post for a brand that does not end with a CTA leading to direct customer conversations is a huge opportunity wasted. At the same time, marketers must realize that people come to a blog post for information and helpful hints and may or may not choose to ask for your help. Just having a CTA at the bottom of your blog post is enough to tell them you are here if they need you.
Familiarity and kinship develop with every different blog post from your brand that they read subsequently. When they see your CTAs repeated at the end of every blog post, saying you can help solve the problem mentioned in the blog post, they get a feel of the depth of services or products you offer. And that’s how familiarity grows into a “Let me check this out!” kind of action.
HubSpot uses what they call “smart CTAs.” Based on where people are in their buying journeys, they can see different Calls-To-Action. For example, first-time site visitors see a CTA that can convert them to leads. Leads (people who’ve already taken some earlier action on the site) see a CTA that converts them into customers. And, those already Hubspot’s customers see a CTA that triggers new actions for new purchases.
See the three types of CTAs different Hubspot audiences see on the same blog post. This type of customer segregation into visitors, leads, and customers can be done with some marketing automation.
1. Google expects every brand to now offer “helpful content” in every blog post. Please get familiar with Google’s clear mandates based on its latest algorithm.
2. What can blogging do for your brand? There are at least 8 significant results to aim for and achieve.
3. Feel free to use my list of eminently practical steps to blog correctly for your brand. It’s a plan I have personally used to grow my business, and it can help grow yours too.
The important takeaway from all this is that blogging must never be done too casually or without a definite goal. If brand blogging is persisted with, based on a solid and achievement-oriented plan, it cannot fail. It pays in ways you may not have thought of.
Branding and content marketing are tough because they require a deep understanding of the target audience, a commitment to delivering high-quality content consistently, and ongoing optimization to remain effective. This is where an expert hand can be invaluable.
With cutting-edge knowledge of the latest industry trends and best practices, an expert can help provide the guidance and support needed to achieve the desired results.
"I am committed to elevating my clients' branding and content marketing to a dominant position because I believe that a strong and distinctive brand identity, coupled with high-quality content, can be a game-changer for businesses. I've done it over and over for 40+ years and 125+ clients."
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Give yourself truly big benefits.
Get my weekly newsletter packed with cutting edge brand content tips, tricks, tactics, techniques, and trends. I scour the Net for you.
Use my Privilege Discount on all my products and services – at any time, without limit – as long as you’re uninterruptedly subscribed.
Just fill in the form to join my community … we have big and small brands for company. You’ll stay on the speedway to growth.
