What’s wrong with corporate blogs
They are for your company’s fans — not for people whose attention can be monetized. In theory, companies start a blog to engage, inform, inspire and involve their target audience. In business, it’s one way of lead generation and selling called «content marketing». But there are so many blogs now that, for the majority of businesses, this content marketing doesn’t work.
That’s why big brands should change their approach from content marketing to a brand media concept. Let’s look at the difference between a corporate blog and brand media: goals, funding, types of content, team, and others. It’s the first article of the thread about brand media.
Who consumes corporate blog content
I analyzed my experience as a user and my work experience as a content editor. There are three types of corporate blog audience:
- SEO-people. Most of the time, I bump into corporate content when I make a request on Google. It’s okay that companies care about SEO, but I’ll return to the source only if I have another relevant topic. And again I’ll do it through a search bar and a request. All because the content for SEO is quite tricky. Usually, it’s an extensive and very detailed SEO rewrite that’s nice for a browser but not unique enough and valuable for content-binged people.
- True fans. They subscribe to all company social media and follow the brand news agenda. These people are incredibly loyal, but they already buy the product so it’s not profitable for brand marketing. It can also be the company’s employees.
- Contractors. They follow the company’s blog because they want to work with a brand. That’s why they seek news hooks to offer their services or to understand brand strategy or identity. They are also hard monetized consumers of a corporate blog.
Why other people must spend their time reading a company’s blog
I don’t know. In 2022 a corporate blog full of checklists, tips, interviews, and motivating content is hard or almost impossible to sell to people.
First of all, this type of content isn’t unique. For example, I opened the Shopify E-commerce blog and found this article:
Then I copied the title and past it to the search bar. Before I scrolled to Shopify’s link I saw three commercials, one fast answer, and seven articles. What is the probability that an average user would scroll to a Shopify article and open it? I think you noticed that more than 70% of people usually click on one of the first five links in Google.
Secondly, almost all corporate blogs from one market write about similar topics. As I said, it’s great for SEO because these topics are on top of the target audience’s interest. But the problem is that there is no value proposition. Consequently, no reasons for a consumer to return and a low retention rate.
As a result of the low retention rate, brands can’t realize the full potentiality of content marketing.
How to fix a corporate blog
To move from the old paradigm to a new brand media approach. It means:
- find people who are likely can be consumers;
- state about business goals to approach with content marketing;
- define the value proposition of your content based on the pain points of consumers;
- create distribution and creative strategy with the marketing and editorial team.
In the following articles, I will try to explain every point above and even more. Now just for a small intrigue, I leave this comparison study:
© Sasha Sadovaya. English is my second language, so if you notice a mistake, please, let me know: sadovaya.edit@gmail.com or Instagram.
