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Managing a Product Blog? Here’s What You Need to Know

managing a product blog

Managing a product blog is a unique challenge for marketers. After all, the product is the focus, but we know better than to simply promote it in every blog article.

Buyers today see right through advertising messages in most cases. They want authenticity — and they want to know exactly how your product will be valuable to them in real life.

So how do you meet the challenge? How do you use your product blog to support sales without actually, well — selling?

It requires a balanced approach for sure, and it’s different for every brand. To help you get started, we’ll dive deeper into product blogging best practices in the sections that follow. Then, we’ll go through a list of 6 awesome product blog examples to get you feeling inspired!

Quick Takeaways

  • Product blogs publish content with product offerings as the central focus.
  • Product blog content supports sales by creatively demonstrating value to the customer.
  • Visual content can help readers envision your products in their own lives.
  • Emotion-evoking content makes readers feel connected to your products (and more likely to make a purchase).
  • Educational content about industry topics establishes expertise and provides high value to readers.
  • Product blog articles that showcase real-world use cases of your product build trust with your audience.

What is a product blog?

A product blog is built around a product (or products) as the central focus. Topics, titles, and blog posts all relate back to the products a brand is trying to sell to their customers.

Brands use product blogs to demonstrate how their products can make the reader’s life better — how they add value. Blog content resonates much more authentically with modern consumers than ads or promotional messages, so product blogs are an effective way to build a better connection with potential customers.

Through storytelling and other creative approaches to product blog articles, brands can help consumers envision using the products they sell in their own lives (and likely decide to make a purchase).

Managing a Product Blog: How to Strike the Right Balance

While product blogs aren’t the vehicle for making a hard sell, their purpose is ultimately to help increase sales of a product.

They can include things like links to and photos of products, mentions of products throughout the articles, customer testimonials and more. How can brands incorporate these components without making their blog too salesy?

It requires striking a balance for sure. The thing to keep in mind here is that product blogs don’t just tell customers about products — they show them why a product is important. Identify the topics your audience is interested in, write about them, and find ways to incorporate products into the articles. Much of the time this will be by direct mention, but sometimes it’s just by writing with your brand voice consistently in your articles.

Let’s consider a simple example. Say I’m selling apples. I have a product blog all about my apples. My goal is to make people want to buy more of them. It would not benefit me to write article after article talking about all the things that make my apples so great.

What would be better is to come up with apple-related topics my audience would care about, then incorporate my apples naturally throughout those articles. So, some article titles might be “10 Health Benefits of Eating an Apple a Day” or “Apple Recipes You Need to Try this Autumn” (you get the picture).

Throughout those articles, I could link to product pages, add photos of my apples as examples, and strategically place customer testimonials where my reader would notice them. Now, I’m building a connection with my readers by helping them in ways beyond selling my apples (like sharing health benefits and recipes) while also keeping my apples in their minds.

Okay — enough about my (hypothetical) apples. Let’s look at 6 real product blogs to see how these brands are hitting the mark (and get some inspiration for your own).

6 Examples of Great Product Blogs

Etsy Journal

Etsy Journal homepage shows product blog articles that help readers choose gifts, decor, or other items for various occasions.

Image Source: Etsy

Etsy is a well-known ecommerce platform where vendors sell handmade and vintage goods as well as craft supplies. Etsy’s blog, called Etsy Journal, has become a popular destination for lovers of their site as it does a great job of showcasing top products and recommending ways to use them.

Etsy has more than 60 million products being sold on its platform at any given time. To feature as many as possible, they create tons of list posts that recommend products for various occasions (holiday gifts, seasonal vacation gear, home decor, and more). Their list posts succeed because they’re timely and aesthetically pleasing (it’s hard to resist products shown using gorgeous photography in beautiful settings). They’re also legitimately helpful to the reader (who hasn’t needed gift ideas in a pinch?!).

The Etsy lesson: Publish list posts to share a lot of information in one, organized place on your product blog! They’re easy to write, fun to read, and give your audience many ideas for how to use your products.

Adobe Blog

Adobe is managing its product blog with articles that target several different audience segments.

Image Source: Adobe

Adobe may be a software company, but they’ve managed to make their blog a fun and creative space for readers with all kinds of interests. A quick browse through the Adobe Blog homepage shows articles written for designers and other creatives, music fans, corporates, healthcare professionals and more.

Adobe’s blog showcases how the brand powers convenience, digital transformation, and innovation across industries. It’s packed with interesting articles about real-world use cases of Adobe products.

The Adobe lesson: Create niche content! Know your target audiences and include articles on your product blog that are hyper relevant for each. Showcase the diversity of your products by demonstrating how they’re used differently by different customer segments.

Parently by BuyBuyBaby

BuyBuyBaby’s product blog features products that help make parents’ lives easier.

Image Source: BuyBuyBaby

Parently is baby products retailer BuyBuyBaby’s blog. The blog is full of parenting advice, tips, and of course product recommendations for parents. Topics include everything from what to bring on vacation to improving sleep to child safety to nursery decor and more. Every article mentions products that align with the topic being covered.

One thing Parently does really well is pull on the heartstrings of their audience — parents with new babies and young children. No matter the topic, Parently’s articles feature products that will make life better for both parents and babies, and it’s hard for a parent to resist that sales pitch (no matter how subtle).

The BuyBuyBaby Lesson: Evoke emotion on your product blog whenever possible. Nothing sells products more than an emotional connection to the benefit it can provide.

BARK Post by BarkBox

The product blog by BarkBox provides educational content that builds brand trust.

Image Source: BarkBox

BARK Post is the product blog by pet subscription box retailer BarkBox. It executes on some of the previous lessons we mentioned, like publishing lots of list posts and evoking emotion in their target audience: dog owners. BARK Post is known for its humorous and quirky content.

BarkBox also does an excellent job of providing educational content for dog owners. There’s a lot people need to know about raising a happy and healthy pet. BARK Post covers everything from safe toys for chewers, to avoiding your dog getting lost, to nutritional foods and more. The blog demonstrates BarkBox’s expertise and builds trust with their audience that makes them more likely to purchase products.

The BarkBox lesson: Educate your audience with product content. The more someone trusts your brand expertise, the more they’ll want to make a purchase from you.

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club includes “shameless plugs” with relevant products on each blog article.

Image Source: Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club came onto the scene about 10 years ago. They disrupted the market with their sarcastic, laugh-out-loud commercials that poked fun at traditional marketing from razor brands. They’ve carried their edgy tone over to their product blog, where they openly cover topics people would usually save for a private Google (see: Dealing with Ear Hair).

When it comes to featuring products, Dollar Shave Club takes a very on-brand approach — they’re direct about it, and even poke fun at themselves, inserting “Shameless Plugs” that link to products on their site.

By calling themselves out for the plug, they eliminate natural feelings of resistance people feel when they recognize an indirect “sell.” Instead, Dollar Shave Club’s direct approach sends a message that says: yes, we are selling this product, but that’s because you’ll actually love it.

The Dollar Shave Club lesson: People appreciate authenticity. Don’t shy away from being direct about selling your product when it makes sense.

Joybird

Joybird uses strong visuals on their blog to sell a lifestyle using their furniture products.

Image Source: Joybird

Joybird sells mid-century modern furniture. Their blog focuses on design, featuring articles about how to create spaces for your home that you’ll love. They thread photos of Joybird furniture through every article, demonstrating how their products can bring your design vision to life.

Joybird does a great job of authentically incorporating their products into their blog, allowing them to sell themselves visually. It’s easy to feel like the Joybird furniture you see in each photo is the best option for creating a sophisticated space of your own. As with Etsy, photography can’t go unmentioned here, either — bright colors and beautiful aesthetics make you want to jump into every room you see on the blog.

The Joybird Lesson: Sell a lifestyle. Every article on Joybird’s product blog invites you to not just buy their furniture, but use it to create a home and a lifestyle that will improve your life.

Over to You

Feeling inspired by these awesome product blogs? Give your own blog a boost with content that both showcases your products and resonates with your audience. The team at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every single week for a year (or more).

Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service to learn more or schedule a quick consultation to get started.

The post Managing a Product Blog? Here’s What You Need to Know appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How the Act of [Insight] Sharing Can Boost Your Business

Knowledge is power. It’s an expression that rings true for many. When we know a topic, inside and out, it gives us confidence, energy and a positive disposition.

Now if knowledge is power, then more knowledge must be more power. Sounds simple, right? Let’s stick this notion in our bag and carry it into the workplace.

Now before we go much further here, let’s examine what insights actually are. Looking up insights in the dictionary brings up a few definitions, each generally speaking to a deeper inspection of a truth.

What Do “Business Insights” Mean Exactly?

In the Marketing world I have been entrenched in for awhile now, it is often about illuminating cause and effect. What exactly is it that makes a prospect tick. What keeps them up at night. What moves them through a purchase path. And ultimately, what compels them to buy.

They often stem from qualitative research activities, such as online surveys, research studies, focus groups, and user testing. Sometimes they are uncovered from more quantitative testing, such as A/B and multivariate split testing or analytics data. In reality though, Marketing insights can come from any tactical activity – so long as one periodically pauses and inspects the activity’s performance before moving on to the next thing.

In the digital world, where nearly everything can be measured, insights float like the pollen of Spring. Digital insight spores float everywhere – and are non-allergenic.

They can be as granular as how one specific demographic, perhaps mothers with toddler aged kids in certain household income brackets, have a 50% higher propensity to purchase a particular product than another demographic in the same income bracket. Or it could be that when using a single call to action (button) instead of two stacked on top of each other, 20% more online orders are generated.

These are examples of data-driven insights that, on their own, can be interesting – but not much more than that. On their own means they don’t go anywhere. They don’t fly around in the air like pollen, but are instead bottled up inside the minds of one – or perhaps a few.

Data-Driven Insights

Now let’s recall our more the merriers – more knowledge, more power. More minds, more knowledge. Imagine what happens when we bring the simple notion of sharing into the equation. Knowledge grows exponentially!

If 40% of those that purchase this, also look at that, then this is something more than a few should know about. Up sell opportunities await, personalization and campaign messaging can adapt. New bundled offers could be promoted. Each of the actions that ensue from a given insight can have their own contribution to the bottom line. This is precisely why the simple concept of sharing is so important.

If one version of a paid search landing page drives 90% more sales than another version, well, this is a good result. If this insight is not shared with others who were not intimately involved in the test activity that uncovered the result, then it will remain just that – a good result.

The real impact on business value comes from something fairly basic – communications. Understanding this exponential impact that insight sharing has on organizations also reinforces why “team” is also central to the conversation.

And it’s not simply because a team of ten has ten more minds than a team of three. Numbers are important to scaling the impact of knowledge. But it is the sheer act of sharing – something so basic and seemingly mundane – that can be the agent that reinforces the “team” concept.

It’s no secret that organizations of different sizes and distributions deal with a silo effect. Globally dispersed work forces, large organizational structures, political jockeying – whatever the reasons are – silos emerge. And with silos, come data silos. Some groups are using different data than other groups. Some groups don’t know about data other groups have.

Sharing Insights

In this sense, insight sharing isn’t just about leveraging the powerful multiplier effect of many people acting on the same set of insights – that is powerful. But it’s also the act of sharing information. Sharing data across groups reinforces unity and reminds us all we are one. One organization – not a collection of various groups.

Brandon Gerena, Managing Director at Accenture Interactive says “analytics is shifting from a look-back source of marketing performance research, to an “act-now” flow of actionable insights and triggers that can optimize live experiences.” This reinforces the need for speed in today’s competitive environment.  We must have insights and ideas cued up to pivot quickly, and in real-time.

Brandon continues, “What’s required are a few things. First, you need platforms that enable collaboration between teams and that integrate with the rest of your marketing ecosystem. Next, you need centralized audience governance and journey management that spans across prospects and existing customers. Last, you need to consider in-sourcing key capabilities like media attribution, programmatic ad buying and experience optimization. The goal is to provide transparency into marketing investments, increase speed-to-market and improve the customer experience.”

If sharing insights is important, then how to share them effectively is, as well. First, consider bite-sized content nuggets that can be gobbled up with ease and comfort. Part of what makes content more digestible is the size of each chunk. There’s a reason the term “fun size” exists.

Beyond chunk size, the more we can do to minimize the perceived work involved in processing the information, the better. Making insights easy to consume also means a consistent format and presentation of each and every insight. This way, eyes and minds can self-train on how to interpret the insight in rapid fashion.

Start with an insight “one liner” that conveys the gist of the insight – adding some creative flair, wherever possible. Not everyone will have time to go farther – so use this one liner to help guide them, in brief terms, on what the insight is about. Readers can decide quickly whether this is one is for them – or not.

Consistent Insights with Testing & Analytics

A copy block that speaks to the background — this could include a premise or hypothesis of a test or, more generally, how the activity came about.

Speak to results — that can be based on analytics, A/B test data or from the output of qualitative research.

And finally, from the results, clarify the insights — this should translate the results into something actionable about your business. The important “now what?” – should be included either here or as its own discreet “next steps” section. This will help set the stage for action to be taken on the insights. The actions are what make insight sharing important.

Keep it simple. Keep it digestible and aesthetically, easy on the eye. If you are using slides, place the background, results and insights in consistent real estate on each slide. Keep image height and widths generally similar as well.

In sum, share what you know, as a way to make your business grow. Share beyond your daily circle. Break down silos. Reinforce your larger team concept. Turn knowledge into power – power to beat your competition.

The post How the Act of [Insight] Sharing Can Boost Your Business appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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