By Sean Ashcroft
TRADITIONAL marketing strategies cannot hold a candle to corporate blogging when it comes to engaging existing and prospective clients and customers. This is because while traditional marketing -- such as advertising and PR -- is a broadcast, blogging is a conversation.

Once an organization understands that corporate blogging has to become part of their marketing mix, the next big decision must be determining the blog’s focus.

I’m a journalist with 23 years’ experience, and for me generating captivating content for a defined audience comes as naturally as breathing. But many business bloggers have little or no prior experience of creating ongoing targeted content for an specified audience, and the challenge can seem overwhelming.

But the three pieces of advice below will help simplify this process.

Great corporate blog content: 1. Apply the business blog formula
There is a simple formula for determining appropriate content categories of a corporate blog.

Take a piece of paper and draw two overlapping circles. In the left circle write ‘What we know’ and in the right circle scribble ‘What they want’. The overlapping area in the middle is what you need to be blogging about as a business.

For example, for a law firm specializing in insurance, ‘What we know’ will be ‘insurance law’, and ‘What they want’ will be ‘insurance law expertise’. For a customer-facing high street cosmetics chain, the ‘know’ circle would read ‘cosmetics expertise’, and the ‘want’ circle would be something like ‘cosmetics information and advice’.

Now that you have a good idea of the kind of subjects your business blog will target, the next step is to align this with the nature of your business. There are three basic types of blog, which I’ve outlined below, and the nature of your business will naturally steer you towards one of them. 

Great corporate blog content: 2. Products-based businesses
For products-based businesses the focus will be helping and informing customers and potential customers. An example of this is the official Microsoft blog for its SharePoint family of business software products.

Great corporate blog content: 3. Expertise-based businesses
For businesses that provide expertise of any description -- whether it’s construction, accounting, advertising or design – the blog will have a marketing bent, and be designed to build traffic and brand visibility. A nice example of this is the blog of ad agency Ogilvy, which promotes its direct advertising expertise.

Great corporate blog content: 4. Service-based organizations
Organisations that provide a service, such as local authorities and charities, will run blogs that by necessity have a strong PR element, because a key aim is to enhance and drive public perception. A classic example of this is Health Direct, the official blog of NHS Direct, the illness assessment helpline service run by the National Health Service.

In reality, many blogs combine two or more of these three elements, and doing this well is something we’ll be looking at in  a later blogpost. 

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