Blogging is the core of a solid content marketing strategy and serves as a low-cost, effective inbound tactic to help further your sales, SEO and marketing efforts.
Blogs increase your brand awareness while establishing you as an industry thought leader and trusted resource. Blogs provide educational information that today’s customers are looking to find on their own. They drive readers to take specific actions, helping to move them along their buying journey until they’re ready to talk to a representative or make a purchase. For existing customers, blogging keeps your company “top of mind” to drive referrals and additional purchases.
Blogs are also helpful to your SEO efforts. By including keywords in relevant content with backlinks, you can drive traffic to your website and ultimately generate leads.
Your marketing team will also appreciate how blogs can serve as another forum for relaying critical messages connected to current campaigns. Digesting blog analytics provides valuable feedback on popular topics, aiding future marketing such as
paving the way for entry into new markets by generating visibility in the greater industry.
Blogging has so many benefits but it’s easy to waste your efforts if you are working without any direction. A proper blog strategy will ensure you’re reaching your target audience with the right information to meet your business goals. Here’s a look at how to go about creating an effective blog strategy that will deliver results.
Evaluate your existing blog
Business goals can grow and change so it’s important to re-evaluate your blog from time to time as well to maintain alignment with your marketing and sales efforts. If you’re just starting on your blogging journey, think about how you may want it to read, feel and look. Some aspects to consider include:
- Form and functionality: Do you have a clearly defined section on your website for your blog? Is your blog easy to navigate? Categories and a search bar can be helpful for readers to find what they need, especially when you’ve spent years building up posts. Including appropriate calls to action and additional suggested content on each post can also keep readers moving along their buying journey. Your blog page can also be a great location to place a call to subscribe to your newsletter to start capturing leads that you can continue to nurture with content.
- Frequency of posts: With blogging, consistency is key. While the optimal number of posts per month depends on how long you’ve been blogging, how in-depth your content goes and what you can reasonably achieve with the resources you have, you don’t want to have four posts one month and then not produce any for the next three. It can make you look inactive. Start with one or two a month, or what you can realistically accomplish and continue to build up your bank as you go along.
- Breadth of topics: Does your blog cover a variety of topics that align with the messages you’re looking to convey to your target audience? Maybe you’ve covered one subject in depth and ignored others. On the other hand, you may be going too broad and need to hone in on the subjects that really resonate with your readers and apply to your business goals. Another common mistake is to post news items in your blog. Ideally, these should be separate, even if you publish formal announcements on your news page and cover the topic in a more educational way for your readers in an additional blog piece and link the two.
- Voice: Are you talking to consumers or businesses? What’s your readers’ level of knowledge when it comes to industry terms or subjects? It may vary. Think about what may resonate best with your audience before using a more formal, informal, fun, professional or casual tone. Generally, your voice should generate trust with your organization and empower readers to feel informed to take action and embrace your solution to their pain points.
Use topic pillars and clusters
A pillar page and topic cluster approach can help streamline and guide your blogs. Pillar pages cover a handful of broad topics, while cluster content goes more in-depth and can include specific SEO keywords related to the greater subject.
Pillars and topics will be different for each company. Structuring your blog in this way can ensure you’re developing content around the most important information your potential customers are searching for and need to become educated and ready to make a purchase.
Employ an editorial calendar
Assigning blog topics to dates using an editorial calendar can further streamline your team’s content creation process. It helps you stay organized by planning your content ahead of time, allowing you to schedule topics, assign writing tasks and set deadlines, ensuring a steady flow of content. Whether you use a simple spreadsheet or your project management system, developing an editorial calendar will ensure you’re covering all your pillar topics and sticking to a regular posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more.
A digital organic approach
Blogs should align with your business strategy as part of an overall digital organic approach, working in conjunction with social media, SEO, email marketing and other efforts. A holistic approach will drive traffic and business growth. For example, blogs should be optimized for SEO including metadata and keywords for Google recognition and pickup. Blog topics can align with the focus of your newsletter and social media posts.
Promotion and tracking
It’s important that you are pushing out and analyzing your blogs. Blogs can be promoted in your newsletter and through social media. You can also encourage employees to share blogs through their social media channels as well for increased exposure.
Measuring results helps you make informed decisions on your blog strategy. Track blogs at least quarterly, if not monthly, looking at the total number of visits and average time spent on the page. See which posts are growing the most popular over time and write more content around those topics. It’s also a good idea to frequently update past blogs that are still picking up SEO traffic, and mark them as updated so readers know they’ve been refreshed.
Overall, a strong blog strategy provides a roadmap for your content efforts, helping you focus your resources, attract and engage your target audience and achieve your business objectives effectively.
Need help developing your blog strategy? Get in touch with us for a free 60-minute consultation.
