Ah blogs. Everyone knows they need them - but not everyone understands why they are important and how they can be used to generate leads with your target market. I continually see companies making mistakes with their writing and then they come to me baffled. “We’re blogging! We have an expert! Why are there so little pageviews? How come no one shares our blogs?”
Well, I’ll tell you. Here are the Top 3 Mistakes You’re Making with Your Blogs:
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Poor grammar and sentence structure. This is a fundamental issue, folks. You can’t have mispelings and mistackes and not understind proper gramar and puncktuashun. Your potential customers are reading this!! Would you walk up to them and speak in this manner? If you have weak writers on your blog team - you might as well be doing that.
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Your expert. Lots of companies bring out SMEs (subject matter experts) in an effort to bolster thought leadership and appear connected to their particular industry. This, in and of itself, is a great idea. HOWEVER - experts aren’t always good marketing writers. They are experts at their industry. Not your brand, not your target market and not writing to engage readers.
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Poor scheduling, poor editorial calendar planning, and also poor response to current events and news regarding your industry. You can’t put all of your blogs out in one day. Well, I mean, you CAN. But why? The idea is to create an environment that people will come to on a regular basis to read the interesting and educational things you have to say. Throwing blogs up on a page at the last minute feels cheap and inauthentic. Same goes for not planning campaigns ahead of time and especially overlooking current events and news. BTW - just writing about a current event doesn’t count. You have to RELATE it to your target market. It doesn’t make sense to just say, “Obama went on a vacation - Isn’t it time you updated your website?”
The good news is that most talented marketing folks understand this. If you’ve got a good marketing lead in your fold - you’ll be just fine. The bad news is many small to medium sized businesses don’t have access to this type of resource and they endeavor to attempt this type of marketing on their own. Blogging is an art form, folks - and can be a crucial tool in your marketing kit of which will drive loyal readers, shares with others, social media marketing and ultimately convert leads. Take it seriously.