Jenn VillaYou’re finally doing it: taking the plunge and looking for a blogger! *cue the kazoos and confetti*
Maybe you’ve heard of our team at Impulse Creative, and are curious to see if we’ve got the skills you need to support your blog.
Okay! Put us to the test. We know we kick butt when it comes to content marketing— and we’re so sure of our results, we don’t mind sharing our “secret” sauce.
Here are some of the ways our team does blogging differently than some other marketing companies:
We Take the Time to Understand Your Brand’s Writing Style
Every brand has a particular tone-of-voice (TOV), as well as distinct ways they articulate or position themselves in their industry. A freelance blogger might not take the time to get to know the particulars of your writing style.
A mass-producing writer may also ignore your company dos and don’ts or never take the time to understand your core values. For instance, maybe you have a playful brand, but the writer provides content that’s dreadfully formal. Or, you always need a trademark logo at the end of a particular product name, but they miss it every time.
A blogger within a marketing company is the next best thing to having your own internal writer. This person will get to know your brand in great detail, and keep a running tab of your “rules,” as well as the unique ways to showcase your business’ personality.
WHAT WE DO: Here at Impulse Creative, we create something called an Editorial Style Guide, to ensure that we’re always following your guidelines and representing your brand accurately. Download our Brand Plan Guide to make one of your own!
We Ensure Blogs Support Your Pillar Pages
What’s your current blogging strategy? Some companies post blogs strictly based on what their writers “feel” like typing that day, but creating specially targeted campaigns can help your team measure actual results.
Are your articles supporting your main products or services, as in, exploring topically related, relevant concepts? Or, are you instead choosing random, wide topics that you justify with “well, it’s kind of related” excuses?
WHAT WE DO: At Impulse Creative, we follow the pillar page content marketing strategy. Similar to HubSpot's strategy, we create maps called “topic clusters” to support your critical pillar pages.
We can help you to create blogs that lead readers to your product or service, and show search engines that you’re an active thought-leader in your industry (and improve rankings!). Best of all, we can organize our efforts using HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool so you can see the progress. Learn more about topic clusters and pillar pages here.
We Account for Content Depth, Not Just Post Length
Some bloggers aim to reach a certain word count as their cue to stop typing. Instead of making their goal about covering a topic thoroughly (even if that means in fewer, more concise words), they stuff in filler to reach a certain length.
Readers don’t like having to dig through sloppy, oftentimes off-topic, tangents to get to the meat— and will bounce to get a better explained, quicker answer.
WHAT WE DO: Our team understands that a 200 word “blog” probably won’t rank, but we know that, above everything else, it’s because the article is lacking depth— and depth is very different than length.
Depth involves going beyond the simple answer by expanding on related subtopics, to cover a topic in robust, different-than-the-competitor detail. And that juicier fruit attracts more hungry monkeys (you know: primates, site visitors— same thing! lol). Read more about the difference between post length and content depth here.
We Optimize the Sh*t Out of Your Articles
You might think, “Oh, you optimize blogs? Whoop-de-freaking-doo. Any modern-day content generator knows how to do keyword research, don’t they?”
You would hope so— but you can’t assume every writer or content marketer truly “knows SEO.” Ensure they don’t just talk the talk without walking the walk by asking to see organic data to support their optimization skills.
WHAT WE DO: At Impulse, we have a checklist to help us “dot our i’s and cross our t’s” with every post. For example, we always check that title tags and copy include a target keyword and supportive semantic terms, include relevant links, check metadata and follow other Google ranking factors to get your articles served up on the SERPs.
That’s why clients like Monterey Mushrooms saw such a dramatic increase in traffic from just three months of us managing their blogging, starting in January 2019.
We Don’t Forget About Image Optimization
A blog can typically benefit from multiple forms of imagery, which show rather than tell. Not only does it break up the text, but they can aid in explaining something that words just can’t quite illustrate.
But just because you add an image to a blog post, it doesn’t mean you’ve made it appealing to search engines. Proper image optimization can help your pictures and pages load faster, your content to rank better and to help to further educate your audience.
WHAT WE DO: Here at Impulse, our team optimizes all images before posting. We understand the right file type to use, how to choose the right dimensions and how to compress your images for web. Plus, we always include keywords in the image names and alt tags to help users, if an image won’t load.
We Can Enhance Posts with Video Marketing
In the same way that images can help show what words cannot always convey, videos display concepts and theories in action— oftentimes enhancing a viewer’s understanding. It’s the reason why more and more classrooms are using media to help students learn and why YouTube “how-to” and “review” videos have thousands and thousands of views.
Some people simply learn better by seeing and hearing, rather than reading. Video marketing aids both auditory and visual learners, but many articles you read online don’t include any motion clips.
WHAT WE DO: At Impulse Creative, we see the value in video and encourage our clients to add video marketing to their blogging strategy. It’s why you’ll find fun, motion GIFs and interactive videos on most (if not all) of our own brand’s blog posts too.
We Know Best Practices for Content Syndication
Do you know what content syndication is? It’s the process of republishing content from your website to another third-party platform. Content syndication involves taking a post from your blog and reuploading it as its own standalone article on another site, such as on LinkedIn or Medium.
In simple terms, it’s displaying the same or slightly adjusted content on a different domain. The right bloggers or marketing company will be able to offer this kind of service, or at the very least share advice on best practices for reposting content.
WHAT WE DO: At Impulse Creative, we’re happy to help you repurpose your articles, as we know content syndication can help your company to gain more traffic, build brand awareness, engage completely different audiences, save time and money and benefit your SEO. And gosh— that’s a lot of goodness for a quickly tweaked repost. Learn more about the awesomeness of content syndication here.
We Repurpose Content to Extend its Lifespan
You create a blog post, share it on social and that’s that. If you’ve optimized it for search, hopefully the article ranks organically and you get some steady traffic. But, oftentimes, a week after an article’s publish date, the company stops sharing it and it gets pushed down— forgotten about with your other archives.
Repurposing content involves taking an old blog post (or video, podcast, etc.), and repurposing it on a different medium, to be shared on different networks as a new piece of content. It’s essentially taking a lifeless post that’s getting little to no action anymore and reviving it, to breathe life back into the topic, with minimal effort.
WHAT WE DO: The Impulse team is always working in creative ways to repurpose old content and extend its lifespan— and blogs are no exception. Learn more about how you can reuse your dated posts and turn them into fresh content here.
We Get You More Than Views: We Convert
While traffic to your blog and website is great, are your posts actually turning into leads? Not putting a call to action (CTA) at the end of your blog post is a huge missed opportunity to convert readers.
The right marketing company can help you to not only develop blogs for each stage of the buyer’s journey— from targeting viewers just looking for answers to those deciding whether to buy your product or service— but they’ll also ensure the reader has a “next step” to take, no matter what.
WHAT WE DO: Our bloggers go after the right keywords to get your article viewed, and foster new leads by offering readers a free content offer, in exchange for a simple first name and email address.
With this “content offer” strategy, the viewer gets more information around the topic they were researching, and your company gets someone to nurse into a customer. Check out how you can get traffic to your blog that actually converts, or let us do it for you!
We Make Adjustments Based on Results
Besides tallying up your monthly blog views and conversions to report to your boss, what do you do with that data? A strategic blogger will be able to attribute blog activity— like traffic, clicks, bounces, sources and downloads— to see gaps in their leads and sales. Where are users falling off? What are they actively interested in?
This data will allow you to make educated adjustments to improve your strategy, tailoring your content to appeal to the right audience.
WHAT WE DO: Our team reviews your blog’s results daily, tweaking their strategies based on hard data. If users don’t care about a certain topic, we ditch it and focus our resources where best suited to reach your goals.
Blog Better with Help from Impulse Creative
Are you doing all of these things, or is your current content marketing execution missing some mojo? If your blogging strategy could use some improvements, consider turning to the experts.
Our content crew at Impulse Creative is passionate about telling your story, getting your blog traffic and improving your conversion rates.
Learn more about our Blogging Services and reach out today!
Writing photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash