The Truth About Your Blog

Whether you’re in the B2B or the B2C category, your blog should engage your audience and grow your business.

I love piña coladas (cue Jimmy Buffet), but I’d much rather sip on one while sitting on a beach in Hawaii than in my backyard watching a neighbor hang laundry. At the end of the day, experience is the only thing that matters: that goes for frozen beverages, and your blog.

But wait, what about the actual content?

While the content must be relevant and valuable—that’s a given, isn’t it?—the experience that surrounds your content can make or break its “stickiness” if you’re trying to get people to hang around. A user’s experience can be broken down into different elements, including design, information architecture, navigation and responsiveness.

Getting Elemental

From a design perspective, the bar has been raised. Websites, content hubs and Web apps are much more attractive than they were five or 10 years ago. Well, some of them anyway. Bottom line, it’s time to catch up. With all of the third-party tools out there that don’t need design or development skills, there’s no excuse for not having a great looking content hub.

The way your content as a whole is structured and how people navigate that content helps lead them to what they want and to discovering more of your content. Getting this right is key, otherwise you’ll never turn a visitor into a long-term fan.

The final component is responsiveness. Can I be honest? I didn’t even want to include this section in the article because, quite frankly, we all know our online properties need to be designed responsively and such that they are accessible via any device. This is why it blows my mind that the majority of business-to-business companies, and a lot of business-to-consumer groups as well, don’t have a mobile experience for their content. If this is you, know that you’re leaving a lot on the table, including higher engagement and conversion rates.

Is Your Blog Serving Its Purpose?

We all have a purpose, and it is my hope that your blog also has a purpose. Most of us began content marketing for a reason. While providing valuable content is the vehicle (your content shouldn’t be “pitchy” or “producty” unless appropriately targeted to customers or bottom-of-the-funnel prospects), your ultimate goal is to drive business growth. Companies who excel at content marketing benefit from more customers and better retention.

In order to accomplish your goals, a traditional blog just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s difficult for marketers to quickly make changes to optimize the content experience. And being at the mercy of Information Technology every time you need a call-to-action or a subscribe form added to your blog just doesn’t make sense. Marketers need to take control of the experience, and now there are content marketing platforms that help you do this, in order to be able to move quickly and respond to the market.

The ability to control the experience doesn’t stop at creating a conversion path in your content experience through calls to action; it also includes the ability to create a deeper connection through various forms of content. As a marketer, you should be leveraging all of your content, whether blog articles, a resources section or a social hub, to create a truly immersive experience for your audience.

It’s the difference between enjoying that cocktail on a white-sand beach or sucking it back on a plastic patio chair to the sounds of your neighbor mowing the lawn. Which would you choose?

Hana Abaza, Director of Marketing for Uberflip, focuses on creating an incredible brand experience while combining it with a metrics-driven approach, allowing the company to truly understand its customers’ needs. With a degree in Finance and Marketing, her background includes operational and digital marketing expertise, both with her own entrepreneurial ventures and through working with a variety of small and medium businesses and technology companies.