16 Tips To Write Promotional Blogs

Promotional blog articles advocate for businesses and brands. They help to inform readers about a business’s products, services, and promotions while enticing them to make a purchase. If your company is marketing new services, it’s helpful to know how you can use promotional blogs to make the job easier.

16 Tips for Writing Promotional Blog Articles

Use these tips to develop promotional blog articles for your business:

1. Start with the Hook

Image via Unsplash by @neonbrand

Headlines and titles help draw readers to your content. Not only should your title summarize what the content is about, but it should also catch the reader’s attention. Hook them in before they even read the first word of the piece. Try these strategies to draw people to your headlines like magnets:

• Highlight benefits: What does this article do for your audience? Mention the major benefit in the headline, such as “CopyPress CMS: Streamline the Content Creation Process.”
• Keep it short: Keep your headlines between 60 to 65 characters. This character count lets the entire headline display on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Add numbers: Numbers in headlines catch people’s attention when scanning content. For promotional blogs with lists or tips, include a numeral in your title, like “5 Ways Thematical Puts You at the Top of SERPs.”
• Ask questions: Asking questions in your headline makes people ponder the answer, then want to learn more. For promotional blogs, consider headlines that make people question what they know about products or services they already use, such as “Is Your Content Management System Ready for the Next Major Marketing Change?”
• Add enticements: Enticements are extra, parenthetical plugs at the end of your headline to show people there’s more than just a written article inside. Add blurbs like [Free eBook Download] or [Get 50% Off] to the ends of your headlines to encourage clicks. Keep in mind that even though parentheses and brackets in your headlines can encourage more people to click, Google sometimes changes title tags so it’s important to make sure that your title and headline can still stand on its own.

Creating winning headlines is a special skill. It takes patience, practice, and marketing know-how. Want to learn more about how to create the best headlines your audience can’t resist? Download our eBook, “How To Create Effective Titles and Headlines,” to perfect your strategy.

2. Know Your Audience

The more you know about your audience, the better you can target them with your promotional blogs. For example, let’s say you’re promoting a B2B health and wellness solution package. You sell gym equipment, fitness class packages, and wellness coaching services to companies rather than individuals. But all your target clients aren’t the same. You might target businesses that want to provide additional health benefits beyond standard health care. Or you may work with gyms or even hotels and resorts to provide other amenities to guests.

These are all subgroups of clients who may be interested in your services. You could write a promotional blog post that targets all of them. But wouldn’t it make more sense to create multiple posts that appeal to each one individually? For example, a company providing these services to employees may need different resources than a resort destination. If you’re not sure how to target each segment, use tools and strategies to get more data, such as:

• Surveys: These tools allow you to get direct feedback from customer or client questions. Add them to your website, social media channels, or email communications.
• Buyer personas: These fictional customer profiles let you imagine you’re writing to real people in your target audience. After in-depth research, they include information like purchase behavior and demographics.
• Social monitoring: This strategy lets you learn more about your audience by watching who interacts with your brand on social platforms. Information like shares, likes, and comments give you more insight into what people want from your company.
• CopyPress Content Analysis Tool: This report shows you how your content performs against that of your top three competitors. Use the data and suggested content gaps to learn about your audience’s needs and search habits.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

3. Tell a Story

One of the fastest ways to capture someone’s attention is to tell them a good story. They also help people become emotionally invested in your topic. And we’re not just saying that because as a content writing company we love telling stories. A 2019 Deloitte Digital study found that 60% of long-term customers of companies found that they used emotional language to describe their favorite brands. When you express emotion about anything, it shows you have a connection to something that goes beyond the surface level. It doesn’t matter if it’s joy, anger, or confusion. If a brand gets its leads to feel something, they have a better chance of hooking them as clients.

Use your promotional blog posts to get people to feel some kind of way about your products or services. Bring clients along for the ride. Explain the labor of love it took to get your product or service from an idea to a reality. Talk about things that inspired you. But better yet, tell a feel-good story about what the product or service can do for them. Let your brand voice and personality shine through.

4. Address Questions and Concerns

For every few satisfied clients, there’s always at least one skeptic. Does it really do that? Why should I spend my money on this? It can be frustrating to get these kinds of questions, especially if you already know or believe your products and services are top-tier. Convincing the skeptics is the hard part.

Use your promotional blogs to your advantage. Use them as tools to address potential questions and concerns leads could have. Take off your marketer cap and put on your customer cap. What questions would you have for another business, and what answers would make you trust them and want to buy? Talking about potential issues or concerns helps humanize your brand. Everything isn’t sunshine and roses all the time. Providing the truth, answers, and solutions can increase people’s trust in your company.

5. Make Contact Information Visible

You might do everything you can to generate potential customer questions for your content, but someone somewhere always seems to have another. That’s why it’s important to make sure you display your contact information somewhere within your blog post. This may be something you have coded into your web design, or you may list the information in the text. Make sure you add the contact person’s name or the department and one communication method, such as an email address or phone number.

Better yet, add a chat feature to your blog that lets people connect with your customer service representatives instantly. If your clients can ask their questions right away, without having to navigate from the promotional blog or complete another step, it increases the chances of making a sale.

Related: Chatbots: What They Are and Why They Matter

6. Give Examples of Success

One way to convince people they need your products or services is to show them how much success other people had using them. Getting real client testimonials to include in your posts helps. Contact some of your most recent or most satisfied customers and ask if you can interview them for your article. You may use just a few quotes about their experience or shape the entire article around the conversation you have with them.

Hearing a story about someone else’s success provides a psychological advantage. It allows leads to put themselves in the successful customer’s shoes. They imagine what their success looks like if they follow the same path. This principle works even better when the client is someone your leads know or trust. That’s why celebrity endorsement or influencer deals are so popular. Mine your client list for local celebrities or industry influencers for your first round of testimonials.

7. Pick an Author With Authority

Speaking of influence, your testimonial subjects aren’t the only people who should have authority or clout. Your promotional blog author should too. The writer should be someone the lead respects and whose opinion they can trust. It’s fine to publish an article under your general company name, or leaving off a byline altogether, but consider attribution to a team member in a position of power. Employees like CEOs, project managers, and product designers hold clout with the audience just by their job titles. Whether these team members really write the piece or a copywriter does the ghostwriting under their name, this trick may help your content get more clicks.

Using a real author rather than just a brand name helps humanize your content. It allows the leads to feel like they’re having a one-on-one conversation with the author rather than just being one in a million in a target audience. These types of people are also heavily invested in the company’s, product’s, or service’s success, making the lead want to hear what they have to say about its value.

8. Add Internal Links and Calls To Action

Your promotional blogs are more than just the words your copywriters dream up. They’re the entire package. That means what drives your sales also include the blog layout, the images or visuals chosen, links, and calls to action (CTAs). All these elements together persuade your leads why your product or service is the right choice. Internal links and CTAs guide your customer through their thinking and decision-making processes as they read.

It’s important to add these conversion points throughout your blog post to give people multiple opportunities to convert. Adding links or CTAs at the beginning and end of the article, at minimum, may be most effective because those are the two areas of the article where people spend the most time. Use introductory statements to alert people they’re encountering a CTA, such as:

• Sign up
• Download
• Request
• Buy
• Try
• Call

9. Be Clear About Next Steps

While CTAs tell your audience what you want them to do, they may not follow them if they don’t know what’s going to happen next, after they make that conversion. Are they going to talk to a sales representative? Do they get directed to your online store? Can they provide their contact information? Adding additional information about what comes next may make your audience feel more comfortable about moving forward and partnering with your business.

Add a list of steps or instructions that walk your leads through what happens next and exactly how to interact with your brand. For example, if you’re offering a free trial promotion for your keyword research software, explain how you redeem that offer. Do they apply it at checkout? Do they contact your sales department? This knowledge increases customer satisfaction and eliminates confusion or miscommunications.

10. Use Statistics

Data doesn’t lie. You can interpret data in a number of ways, but the cold hard facts always stay the same. That’s why using statistics is a great way to help people see the effectiveness of your products or services. Adding data to your promotional blogs gives leads another reason to trust what you’re saying. Every percentage or figure screams, “don’t just take our word for it, we have proof!” Statistics make your claims sound less generalized. They also prove to your audience that you’ve tested your products and services and have results to show for it.

11. Limit Sales Jargon

Promotional blogs are supposed to tell your audience how great your products and services are. But they’ll never figure that out if it’s written in confusing jargon. You can’t always avoid jargon, but you can limit it to only necessary points within your article. Using some jargon helps establish your credibility in your field, but there are other ways you can do that without taking it to the extreme.

For example, if you’re selling marketing software, you may be able to get away with using the jargon “key performance indicator” or “KPI.” Your audience probably knows what those terms mean. But you don’t need to get into the technical heavy specifics of how the program integrates with different web clients. That might be above your audience’s paygrade and would be better saved for a sales call with their tech department, not the content of your promotional blog.

Related: The Pros and Cons of Using Jargon

12. Use Visuals

Images and visuals enhance your blog’s readability. Using them helps break up chunks of text to make the information more easily accessible to your readers. That can help keep them on the page for longer, which shows Google and other search engines that people find your content useful and interesting. They’re also a great way to include more information about your product or service promotion. Create custom graphic designs for your promotional discounts or coupons. Share images or videos of your products and services in action. Consider using video testimonials. All these elements make your content more scannable and help encourage the audience to engage further.

13. Focus on The Problem

Sometimes the best way to promote a product or service isn’t to tell people how wonderful it is. It’s to find a problem and then convince people of the right way to fix it. This comes from the way you frame your blog post and the angle from which you make the audience see the situation. Again, this comes back to making your leads feel an emotion. When focusing on the problem, you may try to make them feel confused or concerned.

For example, if you’re promoting a keyword research tool, your first instinct may be to tell people all the good things that happen if they use your service. But you can flip that instead and set up a situation that may be more negative. What happens if they don’t use a keyword research tool? Are there things they may miss from their content marketing without it? Then you can set your product up as a solution to that problem.

14. Add Outbound Links

Outbound links are those you add to your content that direct your audience to other websites. Though the principal goal of promotional blogs is to keep your audience on your own website, there are benefits to using outbound links when it’s appropriate. There’s debate in the world of content marketing on how much outbound links affect your content’s SEO, but it’s definitely believed to increase quality and helpfulness. Outbound links often give your readers helpful information, which they appreciate. This can build brand loyalty and mark your company as an industry expert.

Improving your SEO may increase your organic traffic, which can help more people see your blog. When you’re deciding to use outbound links in your content, consider the information you’re trying to share. If you’re using statistics or facts from other resource articles, link to them so your audience knows where you got the information. This helps them know you’ve done your research and your blog is accurate and helpful.

15. Use SEO Strategies

You’re promoting your products and services within your blog post, but you need to promote the post itself to get traffic and traction. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important because that strategy helps your promotional article reach that wider audience. Optimization works to make search engines understand exactly what your content is about and who should see it in their results. Doing this improves your content ranking and increases organic traffic. Some SEO tactics to consider when developing your posts include:

• Targeting the right keywords
• Filling out metadata descriptions
• Using images with smaller file sizes
• Limiting page plug-ins
• Using heading tags and bulleted lists

16. Make It News

Pairing your promotional blog with news content helps link your products and services to a trending topic. You can do this by staying up-to-date on the latest news in your industry or niche. If you find a link to a trending topic, this increases the chances of getting your content recognition on social media or direct communication through shares or forwards. Doing so increases your organic traffic across platforms, which gives you more opportunities for conversion.

Each blog post is an important element of your content marketing campaign. To get the most out of each piece of content, leave the hard work to the professionals. Contact CopyPress and set up your introductory call to learn how we work with you to deliver the right promotional push for every blog post in your strategy.

Amanda Dodge

CopyPress writer

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