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Large businesses often make blogging part of their content strategy. That's because there are many benefits of blogging for bigger companies, including positioning themselves as thought leaders and establishing brand authority in their industry. However, blogs are also a great way for small business owners to share good news, highlight products or services, and create content that helps them grow an audience.
Read on to learn how you can use a business blog to increase your brand’s reach, why high-quality blog content is important for a small business, and how your own blog will differ from ones maintained by large-scale businesses.
Identifying your blogging strategy
Blogging strategy for a small business owner differs from a strategy used by a larger and more established company. Bigger companies are looking to distinguish themselves from their peers by cultivating brand authority and promoting internal subject matter experts via thought leadership like a case study.
In contrast, a small business blogging strategy is focused on audience growth and brand awareness. You're trying to reach potential customers and grow a client or customer base, as well as get your name out in the world. Blog content for small businesses is focused on helping you build strong relationships and drive traffic to your business.
As you make blogging a new part of your marketing strategy, here are some helpful questions to ask yourself:
Who am I trying to reach? In other words—who is your target audience? Who do you hope will read these posts? Keeping your ideal reader in mind when blogging can help you focus your writing and zero in on the best topics to cover.
How much time can I devote to blogging? Small business owners don’t have time to become full-time bloggers. Making great content is hard work, and it may not be your top priority unless you plan to make money blogging. Take a look at your calendar and be realistic about how much time you can devote to creating new content right now, then put together a posting cadence from there.
What kind of posts make sense for my business? Your individual business model often dictates which posts are best to create. For example, a brick-and-mortar store would likely want to have photo-heavy posts to show off their products. But other types of businesses may opt for lists or text-heavy blogs that give in-depth answers to common questions in their field.
How do I measure success? Where blogging is concerned, success looks different for everybody. Some people are looking for reach (e.g., page views, ranking in search engines) while others are more interested in conversion (i.e., if they picked up a client or customer from posts). Thinking about what a successful blog looks like for you to choose your strategic direction and decide whether your posts need to include a call to action (CTA).
These questions may affect your posting cadence. You may decide to post blogs more frequently at first to build up a bank of writing to show prospective clients. You could also develop a content approach that includes a variety of post types (e.g., a list or a narrative structure) in order to reach different audiences.
Making shareable content
The benefits of a blog include creating content that can be tailored to your individual talents and audiences. Someone who makes and sells art might create a photo-heavy blog to show off new work, while a writer or editor may stick to a written compilation of recent work. A brick-and-mortar store may produce a behind-the-scenes post giving a photo or video tour of their space.
Types of content a small business might find useful to share with their audience include:
News about business milestones, like opening a new location or releasing a new product
Announcing an in-person event or appearance
Behind-the-scenes glimpses at how you developed a product or planned an event
A step-by-step guide for beginners related to your expertise, like a bakery sharing tips for wrapping baked goods for gifts
A first-person essay—say, to commemorate an anniversary or share thoughts about the previous year
When writing blogs, it can be helpful to imagine how content might be adapted and shared across multiple communication channels. Different customers are more active on certain platforms than others. For example, sharing your blogs with your email list will likely be better for reaching people looking to hire writers and other creatives. Meanwhile, ecommerce sellers with products to show off might find image-heavy social media platforms are better for distributing their content.
Promoting your blog content
Small businesses have multiple ways to promote blog content to their audience.
Newsletters: A newsletter is one of the most popular ways to share blog posts with clients or customers. You can adapt individual blog posts into a text-based newsletter, or create a graphic-intensive newsletter if appropriate.
Social media: For small businesses, it's worth spending the time to set up and grow a social media presence. Most platforms offer business-specific tools to help owners customize their page, while visual-heavy social media allows founders to show off their goods and personality. Depending on your platform, you can share a blog post directly to social media, or excerpt a few sentences or paragraphs and include a link to your blog site.
Email marketing: While similar to a newsletter, email marketing is more sales oriented. You might include links to your blog in addition to news about events and sales or a customer discount.
Even when you're not actively promoting the blog or its posts, you can position your blog so that potential customers or clients discover it. One way to do this is by developing and implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Optimizing a blog for SEO means publishing posts that rank higher in search results when people look up certain keywords and phrases. You can do this by doing some keyword research for common terms and questions in your field, then using them to come up with post ideas that answer those questions and include any relevant keywords.