Many companies decide to create their own active blog marketing blogs, but don’t see the results they expected. Others would like to create a blog, but aren’t sure how to get started. Here’s how to decide if you can create a blog internally or need the help of an external marketing support team:
Who Will Write Your Blog?
You can ask several internal team members to contribute or you can use your company’s blog to position one person as an industry thought-leader. Just remember that creating quality, optimized blog content takes time and can quickly become a part-time job. Outsourcing to an agency that specializes in marketing blogs ensures that the content converts visitors into customers. An external agency can finesse someone else’s writing or even ghostwrite for one or several of your team members, giving the impression that the content is written in-house.
How Will You Drive Readership?
There are literally millions of live blogs vying for attention. Great content alone won’t get potential customers to view your blog. If you don’t have a solid system for sharing blog posts and driving readership, you may want to outsource to an agency that will. A good support agency will be able to help you push blog posts out through social media to drive readership, and they will help you devise a call to action that will maximize conversions.
How Will You Measure Success?
You can use Google Analytics to understand how your blog is performing, but you may need expert help deciding what to do with the information. For instance, you may have a lot of new visitors, but your bounce rate is extremely high. This is an indication that either your content is less than compelling or poorly optimized or it could mean your call to action is weak. Having experts on board to help you sort through the information and respond to it with action can be empowering.
Remember, even with the help of an external marketing support agency, your business blog is a work in progress. Don’t expect to see amazing numbers right out of the gate. It takes time to build up followers. As long as you are continually seeing improvements, you can feel confident that you are on the right track and simply continue to tweak your strategy as you go.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also want to read The New Outsourced Agency Model (and how it can save your internal marketing team money)