An effective business blog can be invaluable for ambitious businesses: it can drive traffic to your website, establish you as an expert in your field and help you establish a relationship with customers and prospects. But in order for them to turn to you as a key information and solution provider, your blog needs to be accessible to them.
Talk their language
The first step to being accessible is writing your blogs in a language that your targets understand. Quite what that language is will depend upon who you are trying to reach. If you are a civil engineering firm and your ideal clients are major construction firms and architects, your blog can be quite technical and still be intelligible to your targets; in fact, you want to show that you speak the same expert language as them.
But if you are an architect specialising in domestic extensions, even though you speak the same technical language as the construction firm (which you might even engage for part of the works), your target clients don’t; your blogs will need to be written in language that resonates with homeowners.
Easy to skim
The online world is one of rapid information. People don’t approach web pages in the same way that they settle down to enjoy a novel; they are not prepared to invest time in getting to know the voice, the characters and the gems buried within the pages. They want to find the information they are looking for quickly.
There is plenty of research to suggest that web visitors don’t spend very long on any given page. One of the largest surveys found that the first 10 seconds are crucial; that’s typically how long your blog visitor will spend skimming your page to decide whether it merits their full attention. The operative word here is ‘skim’, sometimes called ‘screen and glean’; your web visitors are looking for very quick guidance as to whether your content is worth reading properly.
So use visual aids – sub-headings, bullet lists, pictures, different fonts – to enable visitors to understand at a glance what your blog is about with clear signposting so they can understand the benefit to them and why it is worth their while investing their time in your thoughts.
Clear call to action
You are not writing your blog to win a literary award; it is a business tool and if you are going to invest your time (and money) into it, it needs to pay for itself. So make sure you include a clear call to action to help visitors understand what the next step in their relationship with you might be – clear enough so that even someone who bounces away after the crucial first 10 seconds will have digested it.
