How To Create A Branded Blog that Drives Leads
Is your blog doing what it should be? Learn how to create a truly branded blog that engages your audience and drives leads and sales.
The face of modern marketing is rapidly-changing, but if there’s one strategy that has stood the test of time, it’s the power of the written word. Living amid the internet age, blogging should be an integral element of any business’ marketing strategy, however, without a precisely branded blog, your efforts may prove fruitless.
This begs the golden question: is your blog branded?
Rather than thinking of your blog as a haven for relevant keywords, topics, and discussions, envision your blog through the eyes of a curious visitor. Ultimately, the picture you want to paint about your business should be seamless, coherent, and comprehensive—giving web browsers an experience that looks and feels authentic and consistent. The more interested users are, the more invested they’ll be in your content, products, and services.
Every good marketing strategy aims to drive leads, but a great marketing strategy connects people to something they can believe in and buy into, completely organically. What better venue to pique interest than your company blog?
Branding Your Blog: 5 Key Elements
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Voice & Persona
The bread and butter of your blog is your brand voice. Are you intellectual and informative or are you provocative and passionate? Establishing a brand voice infuses life and distinguishable personality into your blogs, giving users an authentic feel for the writer behind the blog. Not only does this develop a sense of trust between user and blogger, but it also keeps keen users on the page and on your blog longer.
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URL
In all marketing, it pays to be a memorable name, face, or logo. The same applies to your blog’s URL. Believe it or not, your URL has a huge impact on the memorability and success of your blog. A catchy URL should be short and sweet, something potential leads can easily retain.
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Color Palette
Visual appeal may be an oversight if you’re not artfully-inclined, but from a user-experience standpoint, a cohesive color palette is essential. Dark mode is a new design trend that’s partly aimed at reducing light exposure from your screen. Even if your blog is text dominant, having some form of visual pizzazz splashed in makes your blog easier on the eyes and entirely more interesting.
When devising your color palette, you’ll need five colors to create an engaging theme:
Color #1: The dominant color
Color #2: The primary action color (for links, calls to action, and buttons)
Color #3: The light color
Color #4: The dark color
Color #5: The accent color (for highlighting special images or text)
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Fonts & Images
Perfecting the ultimate ratio between text and images is an important facet of a successfully branded blog. Visual consistency is key for user experience, and anything too text-heavy or image-heavy can detract from your blogs’ innate intent. Choosing one or two fonts for all text on your site and employing a strict thematic guideline for all images is the first step to creating a seamless site composition.
If you’re featuring your own images, be sure to watermark your photos for increased brand exposure.
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Formatting
Will your blog incorporate video, audio, or other interactive elements? Figuring out how to fuse these awesome add-ons into your blog is important to determine as you build out your site and streamline your blog. At the end of the day, your aim should be to create a uniform visual aesthetic that keeps users engaged.
Perfecting Your Branded Blog: A Step by Step Strategy
Once you’ve pieced together the odds and ends of your blog’s elemental structure, the next step is getting into the nitty-gritty of your content marketing strategy.
Step 1: Establish your target audience
Defining your blog’s target audience is a total must if you’re looking to get the highest levels of engagement from readers. These are the people who are most apt to buying into your brand and converting into customers—it’s well worth your while to take the time to determine who these people are, what they want, and what they don’t.
Step 2: Find your niche
If there’s one thing any good marketer knows, it’s that putting your company into a specific niche is among the smartest moves you can make. Even though a broader blog with dozens of niche categories gives a reader plenty to look at, it doesn’t appeal to any specific user. Determining your blog’s niche is completely dependent upon what you want to sell potential leads on.
Step 3: Select your main keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the marketing world’s latest buzzwords—and for good reason. Blog posts that are optimized for Google rankings are more likely to rank and gain the exposure they deserve, and it all begins with keywords. If your business sells portable baby cribs, your keywords should encompass all things babies and all things cribs.
Step 4: Create a publishing schedule
Half the battle of creating a blog is the actual creation and publishing of each post. Creating a regimented publishing schedule is an important step to keep interested readers coming back to your blog. Not only can regular posting increase your blog traffic, but it can also help boost newsletter subscribers, social media shares, customer conversions, and organic visibility.
Whether you’re new to the blogging game or a seasoned blog veteran in search of new tactics and tricks, using this guide will help you get your blog off its feet and drive leads into converting clients.
