Category Archives: General

How Often Should Your Business Blog’s Data Be Analysed?

Take a look at a customer service strategy as an example – if you’re not analysing what your footfall or website traffic is, what your customer surveys say and what your overall feedback is telling you, how can you be certain that the level of service you’re delivering is meeting the needs of your customers?

Yet although it’s imperative any strategy’s data is analysed, it can be complicated knowing just how often the analysis needs to be carried out.

With blogging, there are various times throughout a strategy that analysis is required.  Sometimes it needs to be in-depth, other times a brief look will suffice and here we provide an insight into the times when we carry out data analysis as part of our business blogging services.

Annually / six-monthly

A business blogging strategy should run continually.  Blogging is a resource that should be invested in for the long term and considered an integral part of your organisation.  However, it’s important that a full and in-depth analysis of the strategy is carried out at least once every year, so to ensure the techniques used continue to be of the most benefit they possibly can be to both your target audience and your organisation.

In most industries, audience requirements change.  Customers start to have different needs and they look for different information from the organisations they interact with.  Therefore, what worked 12 months ago when you first kicked off your business blogging strategy may not necessarily be working today or continue to work in the future.  If the data suggests that this is the case, you need to discover (amongst other things) when the change started to happen, as you should then be able to work out which content wasn’t being as well received as it possibly could have been and how you need to develop it going forward.

Monthly

As part of our business blogging strategies, we carry out an in-depth monthly analysis of all blogging and social media activity.  Very similar to an annual / six monthly analysis, the monthly reports we produce provide an insight into how successful the strategy was throughout the previous month.

Looking at everything from unique visitor numbers on the blog posts through to interactions on Twitter, it’s vital that the strategy’s data is analysed after every month has ended.  Just as on an annual basis, customer requirements can change so quickly that you need to be confident you can respond in the quickest way possible – an annual review might highlight where you need to develop your strategy, but what if reader requirements changed only 30 days after the last annual review and you didn’t analyse your data on a monthly basis?

Weekly

A monthly review of your business blogging strategy should be considered the minimum, but a weekly analysis can be beneficial for a variety of reasons, particularly when looking to ensure your content is as user-focused as it can be.

No matter how involved you are with your target audience, you can never be certain that the messaging you’re delivering on any platform is as suited as it can be without understanding what it is they want and enjoy – and the only way to do this is to analyse the success of your previous blog posts.

When creating content for our clients’ business blogging strategies, as a general rule of thumb we keep two key points in mind – a subject that is either topical or informative (such as a news items or a ‘How To’ piece) and a focus, style or tone that has proven to be successful previously, information we gain by analysing the previous weeks’ data.

Daily

When you’re producing content for your business blog to keep your audience updated on business activities, a daily analysis of data isn’t generally required.  If you’re integrating your business blogging activities with other strategies, however, a daily analysis could prove to be extremely beneficial.

Imagine you had a landing page for one of your products or services and you were using blogging to drive traffic to it over the course of a month.  An analysis of the data on both your blog and landing page would tell you, for example, how many people clicked through to the landing page from which blog posts and how many readers followed a call to action on the landing page.  However, it would also help to highlight any problems with the page or if certain blog posts weren’t sending visitors.

By analysing data regularly, you would be able to see which blog posts were the most successful (allowing you to replicate their success moving forward) and make any necessary amendments to the landing page, so to increase the number of conversions (and ultimately sales).

All business blogging strategies need to include a period of data analysis – it’s the only way you can be certain the strategy is as successful as it can be.  With various periods of data analysis, the four here are those that we look at for our client’s strategies and which we strongly believe will allow you to see the most success when utilising our business blogging services.

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3 Reasons You Should Get Your Staff Involved In Business Blogging – And 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t

Blogging is one of the most versatile resources any organisation can utilise and because of this, our business blogging strategies are extremely flexible.

From budgets through to content, the versatility of blogging means that whatever type of organisation you are and whichever industry you operate in, blogging will be able to be of benefit.

Something that more and more organisations are coming to realise, what is still quite a surprise to some is that we can develop our business blogging strategies in such a way that we can work together seamlessly with clients to deliver their bespoke strategies.  There’s no doubt that we love to fully manage blogging and social media for our clients, but we do understand that there’s very often a need – or simply a desire – to be active in the strategy’s implementation.

Definitely something that can be fantastic, whenever we discuss this with clients, we always explain the positive aspects and the potential pitfalls, many of which come about through the organisation’s involvement in terms of their staff.  Sometimes it can work perfectly, but other times getting your staff involved can prove to be extremely problematic and the following information covers the ‘highlights’ of why you should and shouldn’t get your staff involved in business blogging.

They know what problems they’re facing on a daily basis and know what information they’re looking for.  Therefore, if they can gain an understanding of the basics behind blogging, they should be able to provide some invaluable input for content suggestions.

2.  They can increase the reach of your messaging – most people have a social media account of some kind.  It might be a professional Twitter account with several thousand followers or a private Facebook account with one hundred friends, but most people are active on social media to some extent.  As social media is a fantastic way to increase the reach of your blog posts, involving your employees in the process can mean your content is not only published via your company social media accounts, but by numerous employees’, too.

3.  It can improve staff morale – staff want to be involved.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re fantastic at working alone or they blatantly express their need to work in large groups, engaging internally with your staff is seen as one of the most effective ways of getting the most from them.  If you can involve them in some aspect of the blogging process, whether that’s suggesting ideas or helping to promote the final piece, you’ll find they feel they’re contributing, engaging and interacting more with both their audience and their organisation as a whole.

Shouldn’t

1.  It can impact upon them as an individual – staff should never be made to get involved with blogging.  By all means encourage them, but if they’re forced to come up with ideas for content or write draft blog posts on a weekly basis when they don’t want to, you’re not just likely to get poor ideas or content, but chances are you’ll have an unhappy workforce.

2.  Their productivity may decrease – even if your employees want to get involved with blogging, it shouldn’t simply be a straightforward decision.  Blogging involves a substantial amount of work – much more than most people first realise – and without the correct planning and preparation, an employee’s productivity outside of blogging may decrease, jeopardising their role, their duties and the organisation as a whole.

3.  Not everyone can blog – whilst blogging’s versatility can be of benefit in various respects, it can also cause problems, particularly in the sense that even on the content side alone, there can be huge variances in what’s expected.  For example, you may have a member of staff who is competent at writing a press release for your organisation and who you think could handle regular blogging, but not only is a 400 word blog post different to a 400 word press release, but a blog post can vary on everything from whether you’re a B2B or B2c organisation right through to the demographics of your target audience.

Weighing up the pros and cons of your level of involvement as an organisation when it comes to implementing your business blogging strategy and making a decision on it can be difficult enough – deciding on your employees’ involvement can prove to be one that’s too difficult to make.

As part of the development process with any of our business blogging services, we always talk through the various different aspects that need to be considered when it comes to staff involvement, so to ensure we achieve an outcome that is as suitable and effective as it can possibly be.  However, if you would like to discuss the possibilities of your staff being involved – or not being involved – in a business blogging strategy at any point, please feel free to get in touch.

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Should You Integrate Your Business Blog Within Your Company Website?

We talk regularly about the importance of having great quality content on your blog and we hope that most of our clients – and regular readers here – understand at least the basic reasoning behind this.

Before any type of content is produced, however, you obviously need a blog in place to publish the content on.

We always recommend that WordPress is used when creating blogs, for a variety of reasons, most notably that it is such a versatile resource it can be used for almost any organisation with any specific requirements.

But irrelevant of the platform used, there’s one decision that has to always be made, which is whether or not your blog should be integrated with your website.

With various options available on both sides of the fence, the simple fact is we don’t believe there is actually any major consideration that needs to take place – we almost never recommend a business blog is kept separate from a website and there are two primary reasons why.

1.  The SEO benefits are too good to pass up on

For any effective SEO strategy, there are two key components – high quality content and backlinks.  If you can utilise these in the most effective way possible, you’ll be able to drive organic traffic to your website due to the high ranking for your target keywords.

Whilst having a blog that stands alone from your website would mean you could still create the backlinks within the content, you miss out on what Google is now considering an integral part of the SEO process – delivering quality content to your audience on a regular basis.

You can of course do this on a separate blog and link back to your company website, but how does Google know that the two are linked if they’re on completely separate domain names?  Google is becoming increasingly intelligent, but it has to be remembered that it is not human.  It can’t view images as we can and it can’t tell whether two websites with different URLs are from the same company.  It can of course distinguish similar phrases on websites, which some might think is enough, but having your brand name on your website and on your separate blog is no different to Google than if you had the word ‘steak’ on your website and blog.

2.  It builds trust amongst your target audience

There are various standalone blog options available.  WordPress, for example, have an option whereby you can have a blog that uses their software (albeit a ‘lite’ version) and which they’ll host for you – but you’ll have a URL that looks something like http://yourcompanyname.wordpress.com.

Although some of your customers will be able to make the link between the blog and your company, creating a blog like this can leave a bit of an unsavoury taste in your audience’s mouth.

For example, a business blog should be professional looking.  It should be attractive and engaging.  Your customers may be spending a substantial amount of time reading the content you publish on your blog and interacting with you via it, so it needs to be suitable for their needs.  This generally means an investment of both time and money needs to be made to ensure it’s as beneficial as it can be.

When you’re using a free blogging service, such as that mentioned above, you have limited technical functionality and limited design options.  It’s completely free, which is obviously great, but what image does this portray to your target audience?

You aren’t that interested in engaging with them?  You don’t think the interaction is worth the development and integration of a proper company blog?  You believe it might not be suited to your audience’s needs, so you’ll only give it a half-hearted attempt?

It’s easy to think this is only a small aspect that is somewhat irrelevant, but a blog can be extremely beneficial when building trust and continually improving brand awareness – but that’s only if you take the time to invest in it to start with.  It’s not a quick or easy option as many first believe.  The results can be fantastic and extremely beneficial for your organisation, but you aren’t going to achieve them with only minimal investment, whether that’s time or money.

However, when it comes to choosing between integrating a blog within your company website and keeping it separate, it has to be understood that more often than not, the latter option really should only be considered as a last resort.

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