Bloggers are a dime a dozen in today’s world, which is why it’s so important to make sure your blog is in alignment with your brand. Your brand conveys the tone, messaging and personality of your company. Follow these steps to help brand your blog based on your company’s personality to make it stand out from the pack:
- Brand above all – Whether you are starting a new blog, or revamping one you’ve been working with for a while, every post represents your brand. If you need help getting started, check out these blog branding tips. A great example of a blog that represents its brand is The Flickr blog; each post contains fantastic pictures with the right amount of text to enhance the story behind the images.
- Allow room for inspiration To get a clear picture of the story you want your blog to tell, come up with a few concepts for how you would like to present your blog. Do you want to feature numerous posts on company culture or prefer to only talk about industry news? Will you joke around with your readers or engage them in serious discussions? You may even want guest editors once a week, or bimonthly videos. A great example of this is GE’s blog “Edison’s Desk,” which features industry news and posts written by a wide variety of GE employees.
- Perfect the voice – Your audience will most likely be clients, competition and potential prospects so it’s important to use the right lingo that will resonate with them. Chances are your company already has brand guidelines, social media policy, etc. Now you can put those to use as a baseline for engaging with your audience. If you don’t have any guidelines in place, here is a list of questions to get you started. You can also check out the HomeGoods blog, which covers DIY home design. The bloggers always speak in a conversational, friendly tone, and when explaining projects to the reader do it clearly and in a way that’s easy to understand.
- Content is king – This is probably the most important (and fun!) part of branding your blog. What do you want to put out there for your audience to see? You may find some posts do better than others, so be patient while going through trial and error. Just be sure you’re always asking yourself at the end of each post, does this represent my brand well? Johnson & Johnson use their blog as an opportunity to show the charity work they’re doing in communities across the world, from global cancer prevention to a 9/11 Hero’s Run.
Branding your blog enables you to embrace what you enjoy most about your company and find a way for that to show through. Do you know of any great branded blogs out there? Let us know in the comments!