Building a blog strategy for your business
Blogs. You've seen them. You've read them. But what can a blog do for your business?
Short answer—a lot. While some people throw blogs to the side in favor of quick-hitting marketing tactics, blogs can enhance your overall marketing strategy and provide steady, organic growth.
Adding a blog to your website can increase organic web traffic, give more juice to your PPC ads, provide a plethora of content to use for social, improve customer conversion and retention, and even cut back on your customer service calls. It's also a place to share what you care about as a company, from helpful how-to articles to thought-provoking stories that demonstrate your company's values.
So why isn't everyone taking advantage of this practically free marketing tactic? Because they don't know how to put a strategy in place that ensures success. If you fall in that category, don't worry. We've got your back!
At Reach Interactive, we've helped countless clients show up better online with strategic blogging and content marketing—and we're sharing with you the steps we take to create a blog strategy positioned for success.
#1 - Define Your Goal
Blogging can provide a variety of benefits to your business, so it's important to hone in on why you want to have one and what results you want it to drive. There may be multiple goals or overlap between their strategies, but narrowing down your top goals will play a critical role in determining what type of content you will write and publish.
Here are some of the most common blog goals.
Drive Organic Web Traffic
Blogs and SEO go hand-in-hand. While your website should be written using rich and relevant keywords, blogs provide an additional opportunity to use those and additional keywords to bring traffic in from less direct sources. Evergreen blogs optimized for Google bots can bring in consistent, growing traffic for weeks, months, and even years. That's endless free traffic coming to your website each month.
When you write for SEO, you'll want to write on topics relevant to your brand that your ideal audience is already searching for. For example, an organic skincare line might write a blog on ways to clean up your skincare routine. When ideal customers click on this blog, they are introduced to the brand and may continue to click through the website, learn more about the brand, purchase a product, or subscribe to an email list.
If you are writing for SEO, it's important that you understand how to find and select the right keywords and how to properly include the keywords in your blog so that it reads well for both humans and bots.
Establish Authority & Credibility
Consumers are constantly bombarded with companies vying for their business (and some of those ads lead to scams or companies who don't live up to the expectations they set). Because of that, trust is a consistently growing concern for consumers considering a purchase with a new company.
A blog can help you build that trust by providing free, high-value content that showcases your experience, expertise, and values.
Blogs may range from informational content that provide free solutions and a sneak peek into the value they'll get from working with you to demonstrating how you work by walking through recent projects and how you helped other clients successfully solve their problems. If you're in the eCommerce space, your blog can also provide a space to dive deeper into your product specs, sharing things like its origin story, material sourcing, supply chain transparency, how it works, and why your product differs from others on the market.
Build Awareness & Engagement
When you consistently publish content that interests your ideal audience, whether it's in-depth informational content or fun, light-hearted stories, your audience will keep clicking and returning to read more. This keeps your customers and prospects engaged and interacting with your brand, increasing their awareness and recognition.
When you focus on engagement and brand awareness, you can use your blogs to share your brand story, values, and offerings, making it easier for potential customers to connect with and get to know your business. It also gives your audience an opportunity to engage with you through comments, feedback, and social media shares.
Awareness and engagement content could look like sharing a founder story or why your business was created, promoting causes you care about, providing informational content that pertains to your industry but not directly to your offerings, and providing updates and announcements regarding new offerings or products.
Improve Customer Experience
One of the lesser-known benefits of having a blog is how it can improve the customer experience. Your blog can offer a unique way to assist current and returning customers with their purchases. This can include self-help and DIY articles that teach customers how to use, troubleshoot, and optimize their product, service, or digital program. These types of blogs are extremely valuable for SaaS, tech, and any product, service, or programs that offer a variety of functionality.
Coming up with topic ideas for this could include talking to your customer support and sales teams to discover some of the most common questions, concerns, hesitations, or issues customers face. Then, working with a seasoned copywriter, you can create a library of easy-to-read articles that walk customers through these questions so they can quickly fix their problems and avoid long wait times with customer support chats or phone calls. You can also work with your product team to create high-value tutorials that teach customers different ways to use their products.
#2 - Understand Your Audience
Whatever your blog goals are, it's important to have a deep understanding of who you are speaking to. Knowing your audience allows you to tailor your content to their interests, preferences, and pain points so it sounds authentic and personalized.
Create unique buyer personas by exploring current and ideal customers and conducting additional market research. Buyer personas should identify your key audience's demographics, behaviors, challenges, and more. Once you understand your audience, you can tailor the tone and messaging of your blogs to fit their wants and needs.
Customer personas and journey mapping are critical steps in any marketing you do, from websites to paid ads to social media, and they should be a part of your overall brand and marketing strategy.
#3 - Write & Publish Consistently
Consistency is key when it comes to blogging. Establish a regular posting schedule and stick to it.
Whether you decide to publish weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, maintaining a consistent schedule helps build anticipation among your audience and establishes your blog as a reliable source of information. Consistency in posting keeps your audience engaged and signals to search engines that your website is active and regularly updated, positively impacting your SEO efforts.
To stay on task, create an editorial calendar that outlines your upcoming content. This calendar should align with your overall business and blog goals and account for seasonal trends, industry events, or anticipated announcements.
Remember: Quality is just as important as quantity. While it's crucial to maintain a consistent schedule, ensure that each blog post provides value to your audience. High-quality, informative, and engaging content will keep readers coming back for more and establish your blog as a trusted resource in your industry. When determining your schedule, consider your resources and what is feasible. Additionally, you could partner with a digital marketing agency that offers copywriting services.
#4 - Promote Your Blog
Writing great content is the first half of your blog strategy. Promoting it is the other half. Even if you use keywords to gain organic traffic, you'll want to develop a robust promotion strategy to increase your blogs' immediate reach and visibility, which also helps your SEO ranking.
Some of the places you'll want to promote your blog could include:
Social Media
One blog can go a long way on social media. Break the blog into sections for individual posts, summarize it in easy-to-digest slides, or give a teaser as to what readers can find in the blog. Then, spread your posts throughout your content calendar and direct followers to click on your blog to read more. Tailor your approach to each platform, considering the preferences of your target audience, to drive the best results. You will also want to use attention-grabbing headlines, visuals, and relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your content.
Email Marketing
Creating a newsletter is a great way to keep current readers engaged and notify them of new posts. They're likelier to read and interact with more articles since they already subscribe to your email list. It also provides a great buffer between promotional email messages, preventing promo fatigue that leads to unsubscribes.
Social Shares
Let your audience promote your blog for you. Clever headlines, interesting and quick content bits, and easy sharing options will increase the chances that readers will share your article on their own social channels, helping you to extend your reach and improve your credibility.
Partners & Influencers
Collaborate with influencers or other businesses in your industry to amplify your reach. Guest posting on other relevant blogs can introduce your content to new audiences and provide instant credibility. It can also help you add more links to your website and other blogs, bolstering your website's overall SEO value and creating new traffic streams.
SEO
Optimize your blog posts for search engines to enhance organic visibility. Incorporate relevant keywords, use meta tags effectively, and ensure your content is easily shareable on social media platforms. Keep in mind that it can take time for search engines to crawl, rank, and promote your blog, so it's important that you use a combination of promotion tactics to maximize your blog benefits.
#5 - Partner with a Digital Marketing Agency
Creating and implementing a good blog strategy takes time, skill, and experience. For many business owners, consistently writing, publishing, and promoting high-quality content can feel overwhelming. That's where we come in.
Reach Interactive is a full-service digital marketing agency that works with companies that are serious about growing their business. Using a holistic marketing approach, we'll not only develop and execute a successful blogging strategy, but we can also help improve your overall website, manage your social media channels, and run paid ad campaigns. Schedule a call with us to learn more.