Corporate Blogging as a marketing strategy has evolved quite substantially over the past decade. According to a report published by the University of Massachusetts, over 42% of Fortune 500 companies today have public-facing corporate blogs. For perspective, the corresponding figure was 21% just two years earlier in 2015.

There are a few reasons why the need for user experience in corporate blogging has risen significantly during this time. Firstly, corporate blogging is no longer just a marketing strategy. Businesses use blogs as a substitute for press releases, onboarding customers and to seek user feedback. More importantly though, blogging is no longer a standalone marketing strategy. It is tightly integrated with other forms of marketing, including social media and SEO. Better user experience is important to ensure businesses maximize their ROI from corporate blogs.

Integration with marketing

Content marketing in general, and blogging in particular, is a vital component of business lead generation. The success of such campaigns depend to a great extent on how targeted the audience is. Studies show that the ideal size of your target audience is 250K to 500K for Facebook ads. As a marketer, there are two main focus areas for corporate blogging – One, to identify content topics that will interest audiences from the specific marketing platform. Two, to seamlessly connect visitors from these various channels to your lead generation pipeline.

For instance, a business helping store owners connect with suppliers may target search engine users by publishing in-depth content about picking a supplier. Such visitors may channeled into the sales pipeline by prominent Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons for free trial.

At the same time, they may target Facebook users through case studies and success stories. Such visitors may be brought into the sales pipeline through free ebook or report downloads. This makes the user experience smoother and thus garners higher conversion.

Customer Onboarding

Training a customer to use your product or service directly influences their loyalty to your brand. In the eLearning industry, blogs are considered a ‘gateway’ onboarding platform because of the ease of information dissemination. Blogs make it possible for trainers to host text, images and videos all at one place – also, this content can be seamlessly shared through social media and email making it the entry point for new learners. A cursory look at the popular LMS tools from a UX perspective shows that almost all the major platforms support blended learning, which is essentially a mix of traditional coursework with learning disseminated through social media and blogs among other platforms.

User Feedback

Gathering user feedback regarding your product and processes help businesses assess their performance and improve their offering. Blogs provide the ideal platform to organize user feedback gathering sessions of all kinds. It is quite simple to conduct exhaustive polls or discussions through blogs. Also, blog content can be quickly and effectively shared across a multitude of social platforms. More importantly, it is also possible to uniquely target blog content to a specific subset of customers. This makes feedback gathering all the more valuable towards market research.

Despite the ubiquity of blogging, a large chunk of businesses are yet to take complete advantage of the platform. Blogging is more than just a marketing tool and as more businesses realize this, we are likely to see a paradigm shift in the way businesses use blogging for customer management.

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