Blogging is an integral part of a successful inbound marketing strategy. It provides an effective platform for enticing new visitors to your website, demonstrating your thought leadership and authority in your industry, and generating leads for your business. To perform at its best, your blog should showcase the breadth and depth of your organization’s capabilities and expertise, connecting with visitors at all stages of the buyer’s journey and giving them information they need to move forward in their decision making process.
To accomplish this, you need to tap into the knowledge and skills that exist across your team—not just those of dedicated content creators. While professional-level writing skills are an important for ensuring your blog consistently meets a high standard of quality, it’s not necessarily best to have all of your written content originate with professional writers.
Assess your core competencies and internal experts.
To make the best use of your internal resources for your blog, ask yourself these two questions:
What are your organizations core capabilities and areas of expertise?
First, make a list of the reasons customers come to you. For example, at Blue Frog, we perform a wide variety of marketing tasks, encompassing technical work, creative work, and points in between. While we have talented writers who are capable of researching and writing about virtually any topic, they are not the experts on everything we do.
Who has the best insight into those topics?
Why would we make our communications experts responsible for understanding all of the technical aspects of technical SEO, website development, or printing processes when we have others on our staff who are experts in these areas? While our dedicated writers have a basic understanding of everything we do, they aren’t the people who are best equipped to detail all the information we want to convey to our readers on this wide array of topics. So, we enlist our entire staff in developing content. Our print department contributes to articles about commercial printing; our web design team helps us educate readers about their area of expertise, and our inbound marketing strategists lend their technical knowledge to in-depth content about inbound marketing.
Assign writing tasks to those best qualified.
Once you have clarity about the kinds of topics you want to communicate with your audience about and who is best able to convey your company’s expertise and insight, work up a content calendar for your blog that utilizes everyone’s skills. Dividing up the writing tasks makes lighter work all around, helps prevent writing burnout, and encourages team members across departments to reflect on what they do and continue to develop their expertise as they research and write more deeply about topics.
Utilize professional writers to edit and polish.
While everyone on your staff is capable of putting words on paper (or in a Word document), chances are that not everyone has the skills to create articles that you want to publish to represent your brand. Professional quality writing requires attention to detail, an eye for style and flow, a firm grounding in grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, and modes of persuasion, and other skills that writers develop over time. To make your blog the professional representation of your organization that you want visitors to see, hire a professional to edit it for you. In addition to making your articles more readable and increasing their power to connect with your audience, an editor with an understanding of on-page SEO can also help your blog appear more prominently in search engine results pages, making it easier for interested readers to find.
If you’d like help shaping your blog into a vital inbound marketing asset for your organization, contact Blue Frog Marketing. We’re inbound marketing experts and HubSpot Gold Tier partners who have helped companies across the U.S. enhance their online presence and grow their brands. Whether you’re interested in complete management of your inbound marketing strategy or just would like a final polish put on your content, we can help. Click the link below for a consultation to discuss how we can best serve you.
