One of the most powerful ways to build additional traffic to your institution’s treasury management portion of your website is to create a weekly blog with content focused on customers who use treasury management or cash management services. Below, we’ll continue our series how to start a weekly treasury management blog in 10 steps.

In part one of this three-part series, we examined some technical aspects of getting a blog up and running. In part two, we examined your blog’s purpose, editorial process and standards for editing and content. This time, we’ll touch on SEO, promoting content and re-purposing content.

Step 7: SEO Your Blog as you Post It

I’ll go through a WordPress post, but it will probably be similar on other hosting platforms.

1. Post the text and build all the internal and external links a blog needs to rank on search engines (one of each).
2. Add the featured image and SEO it.
3. SEO the blog itself using Yoast.
4. Add Facebook and Twitter (X) titles, descriptions, and images. SEO the images.
5. Schedule and/or post the blog.
6. Once the blog is live, manually add it to the Google index by using Google Search Console.

Step 8: Promote the New Posting

Once posted, you need to promote the blog posting. We recommend posting a link to the blog on LinkedIn (since you are targeting business customers). If you don’t have a corporate LinkedIn account (what are you waiting for??), you can also post links to the blog on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media accounts you use. You can also promote the blog in any e-newsletters you send out to customers.

Step 9: Re-Purpose Content

As time goes on, new social media platforms will become more popular. Now that you have a good assortment of content, don’t be afraid to re-purpose this content onto a new platform. It’s already written, so maybe do a quick edit, then re-post it. Here are several new ideas for re-purposing content.

1. Expand on something you wrote about last year but needs more explanation.
2. Shoot videos based on blog posts and post them to the same social platforms you already posted to, but in video format. Also, build up a YouTube channel.
3. Combine several related blog topics into whitepapers for customers or prospects. All you need is some graphic design, plus some editing to put together a few good whitepapers.

Step 10: Desperate for Content?

Here are some ideas:

1. Training for customers on how to use treasury management services. Train them via both text and video. Depending on how individuals learn, both will be useful.
2. Video interviews with successful customers who use your TM services. These can be either be written interviews or video interviews. Keep the video versions to under 3 minutes – preferably to 1.5 minutes. Post them to your blog and the testimonial section of your website. You can even post them to social media directly (LinkedIn).
3. Do a blog posting introducing the reader to each of your TM services – regardless of how old or new the service is. You can then link from the product page for the services as a “introduction and/or training” link.

Step 11: Bonus! Build your Future in Treasury Management Services

Some ideas for growing your content strategy:

1. The weekly discipline you get by producing content each week will lead to greater and greater organization success. Assuming you SEO it properly and promote it through social media as much as possible, you’ll start to see more closed deals with an increasing revenue top line. But…it won’t happen right away. Give it 12-18 months to grow and for search engines to start to rank your content. Slow and steady is the name of the game in content marketing.
2. As time goes on, figure out a way to create a video version of your content first, then convert it to text later. That way, you’ll have a combination of video, audio, and text content for all of your treasury management services marketing needs.

Your Call to Action

Stop denying a blog and content marketing strategy isn’t important to your sales efforts and start the process of getting a blog up and running. It will take some time (especially if your website is not blog friendly), but in the long run, will be worth it.

We hope you learned something about creating weekly treasury management blog to help drive leads to your institution. What treasury management projects are you working on? We’re always here to help.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.

One of the most powerful ways to build additional traffic to your institution’s treasury management portion of your website is to create a weekly blog with content focused on customers who use treasury management services. Below, we’ll continue our series how to start a weekly treasury management blog in 10 steps.

In part one of this three-part series, we examined some technical aspects of getting a blog up and running. This time, we’ll touch on some practical day to day processes.

Note: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase an item or subscribe to a service, we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Step 4: Define Your Blog’s Purpose

You need to keep the blog “on the rails” at all times and the temptation is to use it for selling purposes. Sorry, your blog goal is not to sell something to the reader. Here are some guidelines for maintaining the consistency of the blog:

1. Deliver value
2. Educate
3. Inform
4. Entertain
5. Give the reader a reason to act

Step 5: Set Up Your Editorial Process

Having a simple editorial process is critical in maintaining consistency in the blogging process.

1. Focus on creating blogs around 600 words. You want them over 400 words, but less than 900 words. If you go over 900 words, consider splitting them into two blogs (part 1 and part 2) and post them on subsequent weeks. We are big fans of multi-post content as it makes consumption easier for the reader and SEO seems to respond well to multi-part content. Plus, you get weeks of content without extra work!
2. During the writing process, the author needs to note where photographs, images or infographics need to be placed in the document.
3. Once ready, the author sends the final blog over to the person designated as the editor. Ideally, you have all agreed on the “voice” of the blog so the editing process is easy.
4. If compliance wants to review at the posting before going live, send the edited version to them for review.

Step 6: Create a Posting Checklist and Standards List

Every post needs to be consistent with the rest of the postings, so we’ve got some ideas to create your standards list from:

1. All text is reviewed by at least two people – the writer and the editor.
2. A search phrase and META text is generated sometime in the posting process. All that matters here is that your search phrase is unique across your entire site and does not compete with any other page.
3. Hashtags are no longer needed for blog posts except in certain situations where you want your post to show up in a national or international awareness campaign.
4. At a minimum, you’ll need a primary, featured image for each blog posting. If you can’t create your own image (custom photography or infographic), we recommend you use a stock photography service such as Unsplash, Adobe Stock, Getty Images, or Shutterstock. If you need custom infographics, we recommend 99Designs for assistance.
5. Create other graphics or screen shots for your blog posting using your design guidelines for image size.
6. During your featured image creation process, we recommend you also create several other image sizes from the same image and save them in a consistent place where the marketing team has access to them. At Malzahn Strategic, we always create these images:
   1. Featured Image
   2. Universal Sharing Image (1200×628)
   3. Instagram Image (1080×1080)
   4. YouTube Thumbnail (optional – in case you create a video from this blog in the future)
   5. We document everything in a spreadsheet, so we know where it has been posted. We document the: Posting Date, Name of Blog, Keyphrase, SEO Title, META Description, which images were created for the post, and then where we’ve posted it (Blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). This spreadsheet is handy for confirming we don’t create duplicate content – a quick search confirms if we have ever run that topic before.
   6. Tip on image names. Use the SEO title in lower case separate by dashes (never underscores) for the name of the files. For instance, if your SEO title of the blog is “positive pay and manufacturing companies”, your images would be along the lines of positive-pay-and-manufacturing-companies.jpg.
7. We recommend a set folder structure so you can easily find assets for older posts. Here is a sample:
   1. We have a folder just for marketing files and the blogs are under this structure: Marketing -> Blogs -> YYYY -> MM
   2. Inside of each of the month folders, you’ll have another folder for each blog entry that month. For instance, we do a blog every week, so we generally have four folders in each month folder. Each blog has the source Word document, an edited Word document and then all the source and finalized/scaled images.
8. Consistency is key. We recommend posting your blog the same day of the week at the same time. Make it a goal to post 50 blogs each year.

In part three of this series, we’ll work on your blog’s search responsiveness, promoting the blog and ideas for re-purposing content.

We hope you learned something about creating weekly treasury management blog to help drive leads to your institution. What treasury management projects are you working on? We’re always here to help.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.