Many online business owners don’t exactly spend much of their time thinking about the visual appeal of their blog, which might seem odd in a way. After all, if your brand’s website incorporates a blog at all, you are likely to already be investing significant time and money ensuring it is always flush with new, relevant and alluring content.
Why, then, would you want the visual side of your company blog to give the impression that it’s simply a plain, uninteresting directory of article links?
You need to give the graphics of your blog a little TLC, just as is the case with the rest of your brand’s site. Here are a few reasons why blog graphic design can be such a wrongly overlooked aspect of online marketing for small business.
Your blog is key to spreading brand awareness
The blog of your organisation is a key frontier through which it communicates with the wider world. A lot of people might land on your blog because they were searching Google for information on a particular topic, and one of your firm’s blog posts popped up. Alternatively, you may have members of your target audience regularly visiting your blog for your brand’s take on relevant topics.
Whatever the circumstances in which someone sees your blog, they will also be seeing your blog’s graphics. It is therefore a part of your organisation’s website that presents invaluable opportunities to perpetuate your brand image – whether you wish to present your firm as high-end and sophisticated, formal and prestigious, or perhaps something more idiosyncratic and offbeat.
The graphics on your site are important to communicating professionalism
While organisations differ in terms of the brand image they wish to convey through their online presence, all firms should aspire to the most professional standards of graphic design.
While stock images, for instance, are not necessarily a no-no on your company blog, any such images you do use should be sharp, reflective of your brand, and not so familiar that visitors will immediately recognise them as stock images. Graphic design can therefore be crucial to convincing your target audiences that your brand is a professional and authentic operation.
The right images can also maximise the chances of your blog posts being shared
The value of any brand’s blog isn’t just for luring potential future customers if they stumble across one of the company’s blog posts via Google. That’s because the use of your site’s blog is also likely to be closely interlinked with your brand’s social media strategy; indeed, there’s a good chance you will have shared plenty of your blog posts through your organisation’s social channels already.
And when each blog post of yours does incorporate at least one image, this will give the social platform something to work with to make the link to that post more appealing. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter automatically include an image in links that users share, but an image needs to be present on the linked-to page first – and it needs to be as suitable an image as possible.
Better blog graphic design, then, will almost certainly help your blog to gain more social ‘likes’, visits and shares. Just one image could be instrumental in making your latest blog post more immediately attractive and easier to digest.
The textual content of your blog is naturally critical to its chances of gaining the results you want from it. However, the images you use on this part of your site can also represent so much more than a mere ‘finishing touch’.
Reach out to the PENNInk Productions team now for a more in-depth discussion of our expertise and services inonline marketing for small business – including the highest-quality graphic design.