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Two Things You Can Start Doing Today to Immediately Make Your Business Blog More Interesting

Let’s be honest, most of us do not get up every morning ready to read our favorite business blog. I have great sympathy for the writers and content managers who are tasked with creating content for their company’s blog. Drawing people to a business blog, and engaging them so they become regular readers is a very difficult task. Here’s two strategies I use to help clients create more interesting and engaging content for their blogs:

1 – Talk less about your company and more about what’s interesting to your customer. Remember that when you are building a readership for your blog, you are attempting to connect with people that have little or no awareness about who your company is or what it sells. So you have to find a way to interest these readers, and the way to do that is by talking about things that are interesting to them, then relate those things back to your company.

I love marketing. Let me rephrase that; I love GOOD marketing. Good marketing often goes unnoticed, and makes everything better, not worse. When I first started blogging in 2005, my goal was to make marketing interesting to people that didn’t understand marketing or care to read about marketing. I did that by attaching marketing to things that DID interest them. I talked about how music artists use marketing, or how sports teams use marketing. And as I did, I talked about how those same marketing lessons could apply to their businesses.

You should do the same thing with your company blog. Focus on your audience, the people you want to connect with and reach. Figure out what’s interesting to them, and how you can tie that to your company. Think about how what your company sells can impact the lives of your customers and make their lives more meaningful. Blog about that impact, because once they see the impact, they will become interested in your content and in learning more about how your company can help them achieve that impact.

2 – Tell stories. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to get the attention of your readers. There’s two main ways you can do this, by telling stories of your customers, or telling stories about your company. By telling stories about your customers, you make the content more relatable to your readers. It’s easiest to see the content from the customer’s point of view many times than it is the company’s point of view.

You can also tell stories about your company. This is a great way to tell the history of your company or to talk about the values that your company holds dear or the causes it supports. This is a great way to connect with your readers by letting them know you support causes and ideas that they hold dear, or by talking about your company’s history, and making the case that your company has a long and successful history.

Here’s a simple example of how a company can use storytelling to tell its history. A couple of years ago I talked about how Maersk, a global B2B shipping company, created an incredibly engaged community on Instagram and Facebook. Maersk’s social manager discovered that the company’s archivist had amassed a collection of roughly 30,000 images associated with the brand over the last century. The images were literally sitting in a cabinet collecting dust for the most part. No one had ever thought to use them, but the social manager decided to use them to tell the story of the Maersk brand and what it does. So the brand started sharing the images on social media. This helped educate others on what the company does (global shipping), but that it has been doing that for a long time! And all it took was using images that the company already had on hand, that it saw no real use for.

As luck would have it, just as I am writing this post this morning, ProBlogger left a great tweet with 14 types of stories you can tell:

 

So hopefully, that gives you plenty of ideas for how to make your business blog content more engaging and interesting. Keep in mind that building a readership for any blog is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency is the name of the game. I will have a blogging recap of what happened here in October on Monday, to give you an idea of how this blog is doing. Even with a much greater output of posts, it still takes a while to build a readership.

Hope that helps you!

About Mack Collier

My name is Mack Collier and I am a digital marketing and content strategist located in Alabama. Since 2006 I've helped companies of all sizes from startups to global brands such as Adobe, Dell and Ingersoll-Rand, create customer-centric programs, content and experiences. A long-time internet geek, I've been online since 1988 and began using social networking sites in 1991 when I joined Prodigy. Today, I help companies understand how new technologies like web3, crypto and artificial intelligence can integrate with existing marketing strategies to lead to exceptional customer experiences.