How To Write an Agency Blog

Knowing how to write an agency blog correctly can boost your credibility, build your brand and solidify your tone of voice as a thought leader. Like any skill, however, writing is a craft that takes time to get to grips with, and years to master. There are, however, some important points that we seem to see eluding a lot of agency marketers to this day.

Write Useful Informative Content

We say this a lot at incite, but we see it so often in agency blogs that we have to repeat it time and time again. Blogs are not sales pitches. You aren’t going to close a deal in 500 words. Your clients are buying thousands of pounds worth of expertise, not a face cream so they won’t be convinced just because you managed to pack a punch in an opinion piece about your sector.

Remember that the reason someone will go to your blog is that the content answers a question, helps alleviate a pain point, or gives them information that they wouldn’t get elsewhere. Like how to write an agency blog for example…

One thing a lot of agencies get wrong when it comes to writing their blog is being internally focussed. They’ll blog about a new team member, what they’re doing in the new year or what their nan told them about how to make perfect Yorkshire puddings. When it comes to blogging, stick to being relevant rather than quirky. A good blogger can always be both.

To get an idea of what kind of questions you’ll need to answer, a good place to start is buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers and prospective customers better and make it easier for you to tailor your content ideas to the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of different groups.

With each persona (The more detailed, the better), you will have a number of pain points. With each pain point, you can use a decent keyword planner like google’s to see what people are looking for, and that’s where you’ll find your blog ideas, titles and topics in the form of long tail keywords.

Take a look at our guide to buyer personas if you need a bit of help with this.

Optimise

SEO is something I’m sure almost all agency marketers are aware of, and yet many make the same mistakes again and again. From Keyword stuffing to copy and pasting content, there seems to be no end to the agency marketers that cry out in despair as their blog fails to gain traction even though they’re following the same formula that has worked for an age before. An age long gone.

On the other hand, you can have the opposite. The agency marketers that seem to think that if they write about a topic, no matter how obscurely, it will pop up in a search. That Google will just ‘get’ their satirical, 500-word splurge about their distaste for open-plan offices and ‘how agencies used to be’ that reads as a 10 on the Flesch–Kincaid readability test.

The optimum for an agency blog? Somewhere in between. You don’t need to litter your copy with your keywords, and you shouldn’t make your blog sound like a private eye article. In fact, you shouldn’t do these things at all. Please.

Here are just a few simple guidelines for SEO(ing) your blog post:

  • Title: Ideally, place it as close to the start of the title. Google is known to put more value on words at the beginning of the headline.
  • URL: Your page’s web address should also include the keyword. Ideally, including nothing else.
  • First paragraph: Finding the keyword at the start of your blog post will reassure Google that this is, in fact, the page’s topic.
  • Meta-description: The meta-description provides content for the search engine to use to understand the page’s topic further.
  • Image file names and ALT tags: Search engines can only see image file names and alt tags, not the image itself. So, make sure that at least one of the images contains the keyword in the file name.
  • Links: Links to and from your post will give it credibility and help it rank higher.
  • Length: Longer content ranks higher on average.

Use CTAs

Conversions, revenue, business and profit – they all depend on the mighty call to action. The CTA is powerful, important and foundational to the success of any online marketing initiative.

An agency blog should have at least one CTA that normally take the form of a link or a button that draws the reader to a gated piece of content like a whitepaper, ebook or recording or some other part of your website that’s used to generate leads.

Try to keep it simple, and as unlike spam as possible as the further, we can all get from massive flashing download buttons the better.

Promote on social

Something a lot of agencies fail to remember to do when it comes to writing a blog: market the damn thing.

Promoting on social comes with its own set of rules, expectations and structure to follow. agencies are, traditionally, terrible when it comes to social media. For some reason, where B2C companies have excelled, agencies have been left behind, scratching their heads at the possibilities of what is considered a consumer-centric marketing tactic.

Need help crafting some B2B content? We can help you to develop an editorial plan that is aligned with your buyer personas and keywords. Our crack team of writers can even just do the whole thing on your behalf, so you can get on with something that’s more enjoyable. Get in touch with us here.