Your marketing blog is the flagship of your digital marketing strategy. Here’s why you shouldn’t leave it to the intern.
As with many aspects of online marketing, many business owners who are less familiar with the territory feel tempted to turn their digital strategy over to their rawest recruits and temporary employees. However, when it comes to blogging and social media handing the reigns over to a new and inexperienced employee is more likely to result in poorly-focused, off-brand content. And that’s assuming it gets written at all.
More frequently, turning the blog over to the intern is a sure-fire way to kill the project. Your intern, who may only be with your company for a few months, has to answer to everyone else in your organization. If their manager decides they should be working on a different project, they won’t hesitate to pull them off the blog to re-prioritize their tasks. After all, if it’s been left in the hands of the intern to run, how important can it be?
However, your marketing blog is a prominent presence in your online marketing efforts. Managed correctly it has the potential to generate revenue for your company and bring you closer to your business goals. In other words, it’s much too important to leave to chance—or, in this case, your intern. Here’s why.
Have you thought about your blogging strategy?
A well-run blog is more than a series of news bulletins and product announcements. Marketing blogs focus on key customer personas, answer FAQs, and target key buying stages. They’re meant to inform and inspire, and with enough work, they can help draw in a base of devoted customers who want to learn more about how your business helps them.
However, to do this, you need to have a strategy in place. That strategy should involve persona development, keyword research, a detailed content plan, and an editorial calendar. Creating these documents requires knowledge of several professional tools, including an understanding of SEO and on-page optimizations.
If you’re doing your job right, your blog posts will be read.
One reason many businesses tend to deprioritize their blog content is that they’re not sure it’s being read. If no one’s reading it, it doesn’t matter who posts, right?
On the other hand, if no one’s reading your blog, why are you writing it? Individual posts may not rank highly, but overall, your blog will receive traffic over time. Blog posts don’t have to go viral for them to be read. And if your customers are reading them, you want them to be a positive reflection of your business.
Your marketing blog needs a good writer behind it.
Professional writing can be a nerve-wracking experience. Striking the right balance between personality and professionalism takes some time, and it’s hard not to feel awkward about the content in the process. And that’s assuming you’re a confident writer to begin with, which many people aren’t.
Content writing requires several skill sets, and most of them take time to learn. A content writer must be able to think strategically, match their tone to the audience, present organized thoughts on a given topic, and write in a coherent, entertaining manner.
Those skills can be hard to come by. Now find someone who has all that, and can also write articles quickly and consistently, multiple times a week, every week. If your intern can do that—hire them. They’re much too good at their job to stay your intern.
Your marketing blog is customer service, PR, and outreach all in one.
And the end of the day, your blog has a lot of jobs to accomplish. It’s serves as outreach to new customers, addresses frequent questions, and establishes your perspective on some of the key issues in your industry. For many businesses, it’s the engine of their online marketing strategy. With so much at stake you want to make sure you have a qualified driver behind the wheel.
Your marketing blog is one of your most important tools for increasing traffic to your website, generating leads, and building a relationship with your client base. If you want to get the most from it, make sure you give it the attention it deserves.