Content marketing is key to helping your business stand out from your competitors. A well-thought-out blog strategy assists search engines like Google in crawling your sight. They will see your site as a reliable, trustworthy place to gain information about relevant topics to your niche. Fresh and regular content will also tell them to keep coming back for more.
What is a Blog Content Strategy?
It’s easy to put blogs onto your website without thinking about the bigger picture. However, having a clearly defined strategy will align your blog with the broader goals of your site, so that content is cohesive and relevant across all pages.
A blog content strategy will get you thinking about your objective for content marketing, where it sits in a user’s journey, and who your target audience is. It’s a strategic approach to your work and focuses on targeting specific keywords or topics relevant to your business.
How to Develop a Blog Content Strategy
When it comes to developing your blog content strategy, you should have a firm grasp of the aim of the content and who you're targeting.
1. Aim of Your Content
Think about the following questions;
- What problem will your content solve for your audience?
- What do you want a user to do after reading this content?
- Do you want to become a thought leader or raise brand awareness?
Make your goal tangible and clear from the start. Blogs can have different purposes, but overall, they should be leading to the same objective for your business.
There are different approaches you can take to developing a blog strategy. For instance, if your primary goal is to build brand awareness, create longer, shareable blogs that keep users coming back regularly. Alternatively, if your aim is to increase traffic to your website, be sure to use relevant internal links that keep a user on your site longer and target specific long-tail SEO keywords that help increase the rankings of your site’s main keywords.
2. Buyer Personas
Spend time understanding your audience and how they can benefit from the products and services. A few ways of obtaining information about your potential customers include surveys to existing customers, online forums, or insights from social media tools like Facebook to see what demographics the people interacting with your business fall into.
Remember to review your personas continually and if your business opens up to new service areas or has a new line of products, then start targeting additional personas with new content ideas throughout your strategy. Finally, remember that not every post has to target every persona. Publishing regularly will allow you to publish different content targeting different personas.
3. Existing Blog Content
A regular content audit will keep your site relevant and reliable to your users. If you have blog posts already, assign them to categories. Include tags and internal links to quickly help users find more relevant blog posts and service and product pages. Conduct a competitor audit and see what your main competitors are doing that stands out.
Monitor traffic to your blog posts, and review poor-performing blogs to see if you can optimise them further. It’s vital to optimise old content so factor this into your content schedule.
Creating Your Blog Content Planner
Once you have an idea of who your content is targeting, and the types of blogs you want to post, create a plan for how you will proceed. Here are some questions you should consider when planning each blog:
- What blog category does this blog post fall into? Is it a recent company update? Or perhaps highlighting a new product drop?
- Which keywords is the blog post targeting? Are these keywords specific to the blog post? Or will they aim to link back to other pages on your site?
- Which links will you include? Blog posts often focus on a specific area or topic relating to your business, such as a certain product, sector that you work in, or other. Be sure to include links that pertain to the blog in particular, rather than trying to link to every area of your website.
- How regularly will blogs be published? It’s a good idea to publish blogs regularly, whether that’s every couple of days or once a fortnight.
- Which buyer persona are you targeting? Perhaps not all of your blogs will target the same customer, so identify which persona this specific blog will be aimed at.
- Where will the content be shared once published? Consider whether you will post an accompanying social media post to promote the blog or write a LinkedIn post covering the same subject.
Developing Blog Concepts
Coming up with blog concepts doesn’t have to be difficult, and there are easy ways of working out what to write about. Here are a few approaches:
- Data-Driven Blog Research – This is the most SEO friendly approach to content marketing and works if your main goal is to gain additional traffic to your site. Complete a competitor analysis to discover what long-tail queries your competitors are ranking for. Or conduct keyword research using tools like SEMRush, AHREFs and Keywords Everywhere to highlight what questions your industry has a good search volume.
- Questions Your Customers Ask – Check out the ‘people also ask’ section on Google when you type in your main product or service. You can also use the autocomplete feature on Google’s search box when you start to type a word or sentence. This helps to get you in the mindset of your customers and predict the types of questions they’ll be asking in relation to your product or service.
- Annual Event Structure - There is a National Day for nearly everything, and you are sure to find one that works for your industry to create content around. There are also the more well-known days like Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter and Mother’s and Father’s Day. You can also create blogs around the seasons if your industry changes by season. Make sure you balance this with relevant “evergreen” content throughout the year.
Sharing is Caring
Sharing your content across different platforms will support building your brand and its visibility across all channels.
The platform you share your content may be specific to the topic, the target audience or the type of content you are sharing. Blogs with excellent visuals can transfer well to posts to Instagram accounts, and those which dig deep into business work well to share on LinkedIn.
There is more to sharing than just posting the link of your newly released blog across social media. For instance, you could turn blogs into graphics, videos, or even email newsletters. This means that no matter where your customers are, they can learn about what you’re discussing on the blog. You may even wish to consider forms of paid social media, such as boosted posts on LinkedIn or Meta platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
Building on Your Blog Content Strategy
Remember to monitor the performance of your posts and measure them against your goals. If your goal was to get more traffic to your site, use Google Analytics to see how many visitors you had to your website and how many users converted to sales/enquiries from the post.
Gather feedback and new ideas, and make sure you have somewhere to store these so that you can factor them into your strategy. Annual events repeat, and you may get feedback from a post that will help you develop a new idea for the event next year.
Brand awareness is more difficult to measure, but you could look at referring domains to see if people have shared the link to your post and look at variations in branded organic traffic, your referrals in analytics and your shares across social media.
Creating your Blog Content Marketing Strategy
When creating your blog content marketing strategy, there is a lot to consider, but it will be hugely rewarding if done right. If you need any help with developing or delivering your content marketing strategy, SQ Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency with over 20 years of content marketing experience. Ready to create a blog strategy that drives traffic and results? Contact SQ Digital to learn how we can help you in achieving your digital marketing goals.
