A message in a glass bottle sitting in water partially submerged

April 08 2021

by Tim Peacock

SEO

The Four Essential Types of Business Blogs

Writing business blogs helps companies freely share important information about their products and services so that interested visitors can quickly remain up to date.  Blogs also enable your executives to freely share opinions and thoughts, creating a digital persona for their business. Doing so helps to make your business more accessible, trustworthy, friendly, and attractive to buyers.  

What Are the Different Types of Business Blogs?

The first question your blog visitors will ask is, “Who’s writing this?  Whose point of view am I reading?”  To best engage with your blog visitors, your blog must be clear about your POV.  There are four basic types of business blog POVs.  

  • CEO blog
  • General Company blog
  • Team or Department blog
  • Product or Service blog

Let’s break down these four business blog types so that you get a feel for the types of POV choices available to you in your digital marketing strategy.

1. CEO Blogs 

In a CEO blog, your top executive can share high-level information with the world on a regular basis. This level of blogging shows the thought leadership of a single person – the CEO.

There are some key problems with this scenario.  Most executives lack the necessary time to blog regularly. Also, an executive must be extra careful about content – this is crucial because it comes directly from the CEO, the voice of the company, so it must be accurate, incisive, important, and authoritative. As a result, this task cannot be easily delegated. 

Finally, the top executive must commit completely to the blog before starting it. Once begun, the public expects to see regular blog posts from this CEO exclusively.  If the blog fades away, this might seriously disappoint the public.  

2. General Company Blogs

A General Company blog addresses some of the challenges of the CEO blog by using multiple authors to share the workload and keep the blog moving without being stuck by time constraints. This relieves the CEO of the pressure of regular posting while also sharing multiple perspectives from multiple department leaders. This adds a colorful variety of viewpoints and writing styles that will engage the visitor as it showcases more angles of your company culture

Your department leaders can support each other with content details and provide your visitors with insights into the general POV of your company. Content options include sharing everyday details about your company’s work and your most exciting projects at the time. This gives your visitors a vibrant yet consistent idea of your General Company POV.

3. Specific Team/Department Blogs

A Team or Department blog is useful because of its tighter POV focus. It often begins as a spin-off from the General Company blog when one department has far more to share than the others. If your business doesn’t spin off a department blog for this spirited, enthusiastic department, the General Company blog can appear lop-sided. This can confuse your blog visitors who may now struggle to find the General Company POV.

In these cases, it’s worthwhile to design Team-specific or Department-specific blogs to allow your more enthusiastic departments to shine without distracting from the General Company POV. Sometimes a creative design team, development team or marketing team can charm visitors all by themselves.  For example, HubSpot recently spun off two blogs – a Marketing Department blog and a Sales Team blog – each one flourishing with multiple contributors.

4. Product, Service, or Marketing Blogs

Sometimes it makes sense to have a blog dedicated to your products or services, rather than to industry news, company news, or team news. Designing a product marketing blog or a service marketing blog requires a unique approach.
A product blog can be seen as a contemporary version of your product’s commercials. This blog POV has some unique advantages. Some visitors may hesitate to buy after seeing only the traditional single-page ad or a quick video commercial. These visitors will likely appreciate a product blog because they can take their time and learn more about your products from a full series of posts and discussions.  

All of this applies to service blogs as well. A product or service blog can even host your marketing presentations, dazzling your visitors with videos, free downloadable resources, interviews, streamable podcasts, and more.  

Which Business Blogs Should You Write? 

Any one of these four blog types might attract a loyal following to spread the word about your company and create enduring connections. Your followers could share your blogs on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms. 

Your blog posts can also attract new clients by increasing search engine traffic to your website. Every blog post adds a new page, giving Google, Bing, and other search engine platforms a reason to re-crawl your website and index your website again, and so optimize search results. 

Blogs are the latest additions to a successful digital marketing campaign. Get in touch with our expert crew at VSSL to help you get started on establishing the right tone for your blog.