How to Create a Business Plan for a Corporate Blog Strategy

There are several reasons to have a corporate blog: create opportunities to further optimize of your website for search marketing, increase number of visitors to your site, increase the reach of your brand messaging, generate more qualified leads, use the content as sales enablement collateral, make your employees more customer-oriented, give the marketing team more content to re-purpose, and be a thought leader in your industry.

To properly launch and execute a corporate blog there are several elements you need in place including buy-in from the CEO and executive team, the long-term and strategic goals, education of the importance of the blog to employees, and dedicated resources for the entire effort. The foundation of a corporate blog initiative is a business plan.

A business plan is an essential roadmap for success. Typically a business plan outlines the path a company intends to take to reach, maintain and generate revenue. The structure of a well thought out plan can also set the foundation for other company initiatives by helping you to step-back and think objectively about the key elements of your initiative to inform your decision-making. I’ve outlined a simple guideline for developing a corporate blog business plan.

Corporate Blog Business Plan

Objectives
Objectives define what you want to accomplish with your blog. It answers the “Why blog?” question by calling out the key benefits of having corporate blog.

Background
A background gives context to the entire company the value of dedicating committed resources to a blog initiative. This visibility communicates the importance of a combined effort of having everyone in the company involved.

Blog Team/Roles
The roles of each member participating in your blog program needs to be clearly defined. There must be an executive sponsor, a blog administrator/editor, and employee bloggers. Having several contributing bloggers adds more interesting and diverse content to your blog since it will come from many different perspectives.

Target Audience
The blog should be a valuable resource for your target audience to find, read and solve their problems. When a blogger is writing a post, they should have the company’s target persona in mind to stay focused on the purpose of the post. It’s important to speak directly to the readers of your blog.

Publishing and Follow Up Process
Each participant should have a checklist for how they contribute to the blog initiative. There should be a clear action item list for the publishing and follow up process.

Editorial Calendar
The blog administrator should be responsible for creating and maintaining the editorial calendar. They should publish content in context of the company’s integrated marketing strategy to gain the most lift from each post when there are other marketing programs simultaneous running that support the content. Each blogger should have a regular rhythm of writing blog posts in their area of expertise using their assigned target keywords.

Promotion Process
All employees are representatives of your brand. Everyone should participate in syndicating blog content to their social networks every time a new post is published. It increases the readership of your content exponentially when everyone participates.

Measuring Success
Metrics are essential for benchmarking and tracking your progress to reaching your blog program goals. By reviewing the blog’s performance against your metrics, you can make adjustments over time to improve your blog. I’ve included our metrics matrix to show how we track performance.

If you’d like to see our corporate blog initiative business plan, fill out the form below to download it for free. Enjoy. Jennifer