What Marketing Agencies Need to Know about Managing Client Blogs

A blog can be an invaluable asset to any business, providing it with an engaging and accessible way to reach customers, make announcements, and increase its visibility online. Many businesses, however, do not have the creative resources—or the time—to run a full-time blog. That’s where agencies like yours come in. If you have recently taken on a client’s blog, it’s important that you understand the many challenges involved.

What Goes into a Blog?

When you run a blog for your client, it is your task to ensure that the content is as high-quality as possible. You shouldn’t, however, assume that a business blog simply consists of one identically formatted entry after another. The best blogs are versatile, visually interesting, and bristling with unique and surprising content. Here are the essential ingredients of any business’s blog:

• In-depth, well-researched blogs about topics such as industry news, new technology, and the client’s individual services.
• Well-designed and eye-catching visuals, including videos, infographics, enhanced blogs, and other graphic features.
• Shorter, concisely written blogs that are meant to be read and absorbed quickly, interspersed between the longer blogs to keep the page lively.
• Regular callbacks to the owner of the blog—such as calls-to-action at the end of longer blog posts—to keep readers’ attention squarely focused on the business itself.

Why Do Businesses Have Blogs?

It’s easy to wonder why so many businesses now maintain their own blogs. What exactly does running a blog do for most businesses? The reasons for running a blog may vary from business to business—and from industry to industry—but some of the most certain benefits of blogging include:

• Boosting search engine results. The most popular business blogs are original writing packed with relevant information that readers are looking for—in other words, precisely the sort of pages that search engines are designed to track down. Optimized blog content will help any business reach a wider audience online.
• Establishing a business’s credibility. What’s the surest way for an up-and-coming business to be taken seriously? Becoming known as a credible source of information, and even an innovative player within the industry, will do any business’s reputation good—and a high-quality, regularly updated blog is the perfect way to achieve that goal.
• Sparking more website traffic. The more visits your business’s website gets, the more leads you’re likely to have. Even the best websites, however, won’t thrive if they feature only static content. A blog, which is filled with constantly changing content, will help you keep your website popular by making sure it stays fresh and relevant.
• Drawing in new customers. If there’s one goal every business shares, it’s attracting new customers and sparking interest in its products and services. A regularly updated blog is one of the best ways to pique the interest of potential customers. The best business blogs also reflect something of their company’s vision and style, giving readers a reason to feel a deeper connection with the brand.
• Interacting with an audience. Because blogs can be shared and spread around the internet, they are the perfect way to expand your business’s visibility and raise awareness of your products. Comments, feedback, links, and sharing all deepen your connection to your audience, thus strengthening your company brand and positioning you for increased online prominence in the future.

The many advantages of a blog, however, all rest on a single prerequisite: The blog must be high-quality. If a business’s blog is filled with repeated content, old news, and uninspired graphics, it will reflect poorly on the business along with likely failing to bring in traffic. In order to enjoy the benefits of blogging, a business needs to ensure that every aspect of its blog is well thought-out.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Blogging

When you have contracted to provide your client with content on a regular basis, you face the daunting task of coming up with original content several times a week. This is a challenge that can exhaust the resources of most companies, particularly if this is a service they are providing to more than one client. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: You can outsource the work to a company that provides professional-quality content. The advantages of outsourcing include:

• You can count on the work’s quality. Good blogging requires experience. When you’re outsourcing, you don’t have to depend on your own team’s work—you can search until you find a company with high standards and a record of excellent work. When you can be assured of the quality of work you’re receiving for your client’s website, you can be confident that your relationship with your client will stay strong.
• Outsourcing saves you time. Blogging can be time-consuming work, especially if it’s the first time you’ve attempted it. When you’re working with a professional content provider, you can generally count on the work being delivered to you as fast as possible—after all, that’s what they do best. Because a content provider specializes in this type of work, they can research, write, and produce content much more quickly than most companies can.
• You’ll be working with experienced specialists. Blogging professionals know their business inside and out, and they will know how to properly target an audience, optimize the blog posts to appeal to search engines, and craft content that will catch the eye of potential customers. Instead of trying to do it all yourself and putting a strain on your own company’s resources, why not rely on the expertise of an outside company?
• You can draw on outside talent. No matter how much talent there is within your company, it’s a safe bet that a professional content provider will have exciting creative resources and an original perspective that will bring something special to your outsourced work. The most successful businesses look far and wide for talent they can use, and outsourcing allows you to make the blog you’re running much better than it could be otherwise.
• Outsourcing is good for your budget. When you produce blogs internally, you’ll need to find, hire, and maintain a full-time creative team. That means you’ll need to spend the money to train employees, along with providing them with a salary and benefits. When you work with a creative team outside your own company, none of that applies. Once you’ve paid for the work itself, you can provide it to your client, under you name, with no additional expense to your own company.
• You can post more content. When your blog is being produced by an in-house team, every single post requires an investment of your time and money. That’s not the case when you’re working with an outside firm, when you can request as much content for your blog as you want, as often as you want. No matter what type of content you require, outsourcing is by far the most efficient way to run a regular blog for your clients.
• Outsourcing removes the burden from you. Managing any blog is a major venture—and it can rapidly begin to eat up your time and resources. When you pass the creative responsibility along to an outside company, that burden simply vanishes. Instead of worrying about coming up with enough quality content for the blog from week to week, you can focus your attention elsewhere.
• The writing will be effective. Writing well for a business’s blog takes a certain knack. The writing should be professional yet accessible, and it should be polished and free of errors. Effective business blogging requires both a storyteller’s touch and an insider’s perspective. It’s a job that requires skill, patience, and expertise. When you contract with a full-time content provider to get the content for your client’s blog, however, you don’t have to sweat over these details—you can rest assured that the professionals you’re working with will handle the business of writing and editing the actual blog posts.

The challenges of running a regular blog can be formidable—which is why we’re here to help. The content specialists at Pennington Creative can provide your agency with outstanding written and graphic content, along with an editorial calendar to ensure that your clients’ blogs stay on track and never lose relevance. Our team members have handled content for a wide array of industries, and we can provide everything from in-depth blog posts to stylish and fact-packed infographics. When you contact our team, we’ll develop a unique package for your agency that will enable you to meet all of your (and your clients’) goals. Contact us today to set up a discovery call!