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6 Business Blog Examples To Show Your Boss

How can you position your business at the top of the pack? Radiating consumer and commercial wisdom is challenging if you haven’t got the time to concentrate on what you want to say.


Even though you have the best intentions for your business blog, it can be tough to maintain your focus, and give it the time and resources it needs.

As we all know, blogs require constant nurturing. It can be difficult to allocate the desired amount of energy to grow it. A business experiencing never-ending challenges can struggle to give a blog immediate attention.

Despite all the tools that help you create quality content, it’s hard to know what’s going to hit, and what’s going to miss.

That’s why we’ve come up with five great business blog examples you can show your boss, to prove that this strategy works. Blogs aren’t a drain on resources. They’re an integral part of your marketing strategy. If you execute them well, you can achieve the goals you’ve set for your website. So let’s get started.


1. Moz - Great Design Gets Customers Tumbling Down That Funnel

moz blog

Some blogs are just about info, and that’s fine if you only want to inform. But what if you want your content to have a wow factor? It’s not only about the words on the page, but how you display them.

Some of the best business blogs around are visited time and time again by customers and business professionals because the content is so well-presented.

Imagine standing up at a conference to deliver your quarterly review wearing your pyjamas. You wouldn’t do it - no matter how compelling your presentation was.

The same goes for your blog. Take a look at the Moz blog for some of the best examples of business blog design, and you’ll begin to sense a pattern.

Every blog has:

  • Enticing visuals that draw you in
  • A wide variety of topics clearly on display
  • Easy to navigate to different topics
  • Simple, explanatory illustrations
  • Evidence of engagement with blog posts

Making an effort to share your content in innovative and eye-catching ways will make it even more likely that customers will return to hear what you have to say. If your website’s homepage is your shop front, your blog is the shelves packed full of must-have buys.

You might not be selling directly through your blog posts, but you’re forming your customers' opinions and pushing them down the funnel, which is just as important.


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2. Money Saving Expert - Creating Content That Suits Certain Buyer Personas

money calculator

In content marketing, it’s difficult to create blog posts that suit every customer you have.


That’s precisely why you shouldn’t do it.


Customers love to know you understand them, and one way you can do this is to create content that relates to their needs. Money Saving Expert is fantastic at this. By understanding their customer base, they can create content that’s tailored specifically for certain groups.

By continuing to do this for all their specific groups of customers, they can be more or less certain that anyone reaching their website will be able to find at least one blog post or long piece that pertains exactly to their needs.

Good examples of their unique content created for users are posts like their Mortgage Calculator. While Money Saving Expert will receive no direct revenue from customers being able to help themselves to information, they have understood that by providing this information freely, they’ve developed trust.

These customers are now more likely to use their website for other information, news and special offers.

It’s true that not every visitor to this website would be interested in using a mortgage calculator. The point is that other visitors are equally catered for with specific posts aimed directly at their needs.


Consider Your Content Format

Tools created for use by customers are popular. For one thing, they’re highly interactive, which is irresistible to any passing visitor. When was the last time you passed up the opportunity to fill out a quiz? You can’t. It’s a compulsion!

Getting your blog visitors to engage directly with your content gives them a feeling of investment, and it pushes them to make choices and enter information, which you can then use to your advantage.

What would you do with the data you collected? Create more content? It’s a perpetual motion machine that keeps on giving.

Task

Think about what your company could offer visitors to your website that goes beyond the usual blog post format. How would you encourage them to use it?


3. Qantas - Grab Attention With Good-Looking Content

In a previous blog post, we talked about how great looking content can be as effective as lengthy, information-rich posts when it comes to hooking readers.

This year, Australian airline Qantas won the 2018 Content Marketing Award for best marketing programme in travel/tourism. Why? Let’s have a look.



The project could have been a series of online blog posts detailing how a young person could travel the world. That would have fit the brief, and it would’ve worked to some extent.

What Qantas did instead was work with an agency to create a sub-brand - AWOL - to show unusual areas of popular travel destinations; aimed at a younger audience looking for something different.

By using video in this campaign and backing it up with print media and online web content, the airline generated a buzz around more obscure travel destinations where urban art and obscure eateries were the focal points.

This innovative approach wouldn’t have been achievable without cross-platform video and imagery, and it has had the knock-on effect of rejuvenating its image across the range of its customer demographic.

If you’ve got a good idea, you should run with it and let it grow!

further reading

Take a look at our blog post on how to make the most of brainstorming sessions to see how you can get real creative projects from fast-paced idea sessions.


4. Red-Fern - Give Your Business Blog Its Own Resources Section

red-fern blog

Let’s assume you want to create quality pieces of content that your B2B readers and customers will want to revisit. When you do this, you need to make sure your content is easy to navigate, and all your resources are accessible with a few clicks.

Our resources section shows downloadable content that helps businesses develop in various ways.

In here you’ll find things like our media content strategy blueprint, reports and statistics and templates for business planning activities like buyer personas and SMART marketing goals.

These posts aim to give you a free resource and give you all the information you need to get the best from it.

It’s a halo effect. Set your content a high bar and the rest of your business will benefit from the angelic glow of your industry leader status.


5. HubSpot - Give Away Your Deepest Business Secrets

hubspot blog

Call it Helen, because the HubSpot blog is full of information that has launched a 1000 businesses. (Have a think. You’ll get it.) Head over there to see hundreds of blog posts with specific industry information that’ll help you solve your problems.

Need help with your eshot subject lines? They’ve got a blog post about that for you. Want an in-depth look into the types of customers you need to reach out to? They’ve got that too.

No matter what you’re interested in or what you need, HubSpot’s blog will have content marketing blog posts that give you exactly what you need. For free.

Why do they give it away?!


Because it helps you to be successful. Because it builds trust. Because it sustains their position as a real industry leader. Because most of all, it’ll keep you visiting over and over again looking for more morsels of their wisdom.

Take a look. Their URL isn’t a list of characters and figures for no reason. They’re tracking every visit to help them understand their customer base better. You could do that too.

That’s why it’s worth it. You’re building a customer base who’ll return, but you can also track them using cookies if they leave.

key point

Free information is never free. You’ll always pay a small price, and your email is usually enough!


6. Medium - Step Outside Your Website

medium blog

As far as business blog ideas go, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but businesses can improve their reputation amongst their audience by updating a blog that’s separate to their website.

They do this by setting up blogs on platforms hosted by other companies. Rather than diluting their messaging, it helps to secure their position as a generous provider of useful, enlightening information.

One such platform that’s been used to great effect is Medium. This easy-to-use blogging site enables anyone to post articles on any manner of subjects - and thousands of people do so every single month.

What’s unique about Medium is that businesses can create sub-sites to host their posts - and that’s what NextVIew Ventures have done with Better Everyday. This version of their blog is more accessible to readers a the top of their sales funnel, reeling them in with inquisitive pieces that ask questions and ignite interest.

Why have they chosen to do this outside of their website? It could be one of two reasons.

  1. They wanted to make use of Medium’s powerful publishing clout
  2. They saw that they were missing out on a customer base who weren’t visiting their website

If you’re struggling to hook people or herd them to your website (yes, we do realise customers are human), go to them. Medium is where people go to find long-form content on subjects they might not already be enthralled by.


Basically: If you can’t beat them, join them!


Build It & They Will Come!

There are hesitations about business blogs, and one we hear the most is "will anyone be interested in what our business has to say?" Do you know what we always say to that?

There’s only one way to find out!

Every business has an audience. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have any customers, and that would be worrying. Don’t let your audience be passive.

Grab them and shake up their expectations of who you are and what you can offer them. Let your blog be a gateway into a thousand other products and services they never thought they could get from you.


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