Amanda Hicken
The era of the single-author brand blog is over.
When blogging made its leap from personal journaling to the realm of content marketing, it needed the influence of a handful of dynamic personalities who could shape the blogging community and inspire other marketers to embrace it.
However, as more brands began to adopt content marketing, blogging evolved into a team sport.
Many of today’s most successful blogs found their success by offering up both depth — and breadth — of knowledge. Even blogs initially created by individuals have expanded their authorship to spotlight additional contributors.
Look around you. Today’s brands distinguish themselves not just by the products they offer, but by the employees they hire and develop. Your company is filled with potential contributors for your blog.
Here are five reasons a multi-author blog featuring your company’s experts can boost your marketing strategy.
Varied Voices: When a brand limits its blog to the voice of one or two bloggers, it misses out on an opportunity to showcase the diversity of its employees – their varied experiences and expertise.
Your blog is likely speaking to multiple personas who have different preferences for the style of content they consume. What resonates with a C-suite executive may not appeal to a manager or junior employee, and vice versa.
Featuring different voices enables a brand to connect with a larger audience.
Critical Insights: A topic can be mastered only by delving into it. That means researching and speaking with stakeholders and learning about all of the challenges and issues that surround it. Developing this expertise takes a lot of time and resources.
No one can be expected to be an expert on all topics pertinent to your business.
By featuring multiple authors on your blog, you can tap into the insights of all of your experts to better reach your audience with topics that will appeal to them.
Authentic Authority: Just as your brand’s experts know the problems your audience is struggling with, they also know the answers. A true expert is constantly researching their area of expertise — learning about the data, trends and innovations that will help their organization’s audience. Your expert authors can offer your readers current information and informed opinion, lending credibility to your overall brand.
A Safeguard Against the Inevitable: People leave, but blogs remain. It’s a fact of life that your employees will move up and on – either to different departments and responsibilities or different companies.
Because of this, you don’t want to become too dependent on the voice or expertise of one person. It can be difficult to fill that void if they leave.
You can avoid this situation entirely by proactively cultivating multiple authors and continually adding new ones into the mix.
Invested Employees: Brands and their audience aren’t the only ones who benefit from a multi-author blog. Your employees who are contributing to it can use the opportunity to develop writing skills, gain exposure and – depending on how it goes – leverage themselves as a thought leader within their industry.
Professional development is an important selling point for recruiting and retaining employees who care about your company. Inviting employees to contribute to your blog can be one way to accomplish this.
With all of that said, your multi-author blog can’t be a free-for-all. The one tip I’d leave you with is to enlist a content manager who can:
- Identify subject matter experts from across all areas of your company
- Cultivate these potential contributors by working with them to improve their blogging
- Unify the blog’s message by carefully editing, updating and connecting related content
Your brand’s blog can be a vital part of your overall content strategy. Learn more about creating content that will connect with and convert customers by downloading our Buyer 2.0 Content Strategy Checklist.
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