Blogs are a simple and efficient way to provide valuable content to your target audience. You can use them to answer common questions and present critical information in a conversational, easy-to-understand manner. What’s more, blogs act as a mouthpiece for your company and are a great way to establish your expertise in a field.
However, for blogs to be truly effective, you have to execute them right. If you haven’t been seeing results from blogs, don’t throw in the towel just yet! Keep reading to learn about five common blog writing mistakes and how you can remedy them.
You don’t analyze your audience first
Diving headfirst into creating blog content, without analyzing your target audience, is a rookie mistake. When you skip this step, you won’t know whom you’re talking to, their awareness levels, and what they’re looking for.
Fortunately for you, people spend an average of 2+ hours on social media daily. This makes social media platforms a great place to understand your target audience’s preferences and pain points. Apart from providing you with insights on what you should talk about, this analysis will help you determine content length and formats. Your research will also reveal your audience’s existing knowledge levels. Cumulatively, this measure will help you zero in on the blog tonality and language as well, for even better results.
As an additional measure, you can track visitors on your website. This way, you can find out which pages are generating maximum interest, and in turn, which services/products are people most curious about. This can also guide your blogging efforts.
Your headlines are strictly factual
No, we’re not saying you should make up a fictional headline. Instead, we’re recommending that you add some pizzazz. Craft headlines in a way that they showcase the essence of your blog, and entice the reader to click and read more. Some ways to make your headlines more click-worthy are to use numbers (for example: 7 things you should know about IoT) or, to phrase them as questions (for example, the title of this article: Are you still making these 5 blog mistakes?). Additionally, try to incorporate power words, action words, and emotional words into your title to trigger a click.
Your blogs feature reams of text
When you’re creating B2B blogs, you definitely have a lot to say—after all, you’re passionate about the subject and are a domain expert. However, bear in mind that your reader probably isn’t. Therefore, swathes of text can be overwhelming. In fact, paragraphs after paragraphs of text can cause readers to quickly exit the blog. This is likely to contribute to a high bounce rate.
To remedy this, improve readability and ultimately make your blogs useful for your target audience, segment your article well, through subheads, lists, and tables, where necessary. Even spacing your content can transform a cluttered, incomprehensible blog into a delightful one with a high readability score. To this end, also consider highlighting key phrases and sentences so that they stand out and easily capture the reader’s attention. Not only do these measures elevate your audience’s experience, some of them even contribute to better SEO performance, making for a win-win situation.
You don’t pay attention to curb appeal
Assume that you are house hunting. Even before you enter the house and explore it room by room, you make an impression based on the approach and the exteriors. This is known as curb appeal, and applies to B2B blog writing as well!
If your article doesn’t ‘look’ interesting when someone is scanning through it, they might not read it at all. So, to make your blogs top performers, combine text with visual content. A study found that when you add a relevant image to text, people are able to recall 65% of the information even three days later. This is probably why 62% of marketers consider visual content to be a critical part of their blog strategy. So, weave in images, infographics, motion graphics, diagrams, and even videos. You can embed them into your article individually, or in a combination to improve reach and efficacy.
While you’re at it, name your images and video files appropriately. Add alt tags to images and subtitles to videos. This extra step helps augment your SEO efforts.
Your blogs don’t encourage participation
Blogs don’t just boost awareness and steer purchase decisions. In fact, they’re a great way to build credibility, as well as loyal, engaged followership. The latter two benefits hinge on how you write your blogs. Ask questions, invite suggestions and encourage commenting. Make sure your blog’s design facilitates quick reactions and has a dedicated comments section. Then, engage with all the comments you receive. In this way, you can build a strong relationship with your target audience, and also urge them to read your blogs regularly.
Lastly, never post a blog without a thorough check. This helps you catch errors and plagiarism that can compromise your credibility. Furthermore, to get all the benefits we’ve discussed before—be it better discoverability, higher traffic, or improved SEO ranking—make sure that your blog design is appealing, that you have social sharing buttons on every blog page and that your template is easy to navigate.
All put together, it is a tall order. However, each and every aspect is unmissable, since it has a significant bearing on the results you reap. With this in mind, deploy the task of content creation and blogging to the best in the business. Why not elevate your online presence with Resolute B2B’s content marketing services? Drop us an email at info@b2bresolute.com with your requirements, and we’ll take care of the rest.
