There is a saying that failing to plan is planning to fail. And it is true, especially in digital marketing for small and medium sized businesses. You do not have the budget to hire professionals. So you have to deal with many tasks on your own. One of these tasks is maintaining a company blog. Since content is at the core of SEO and digital marketing, you must get it right. To do so, you need to create an effective blog content strategy.
Why Do You Need a Blog Content Strategy?
When you have a business to run, and rely on its revenues for your livelihood, you cannot afford to learn by trial and error. In other aspects of life, you may experiment and learn from your mistakes.
In business, one error can turn your customers away, straight into your competitors’ open arms. Thus, you will need an effective blog content strategy in place even before you post your first article.
Here are just a few reasons:
- You can’t afford to waste time creating useless content
- You don’t want to hurt your brand image
- You don’t want to confuse your readers.
Last but not least, you can believe the 60% of organizations surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute and claimed that having a strategy in place improved the efficiency of their digital marketing.
The Five Steps to Create an Effective Blog Content Strategy
Now, how do you create such a strategy? Where do you start? Here is a simple, step by step guide for you:
Step 1: Identify Your Business Goals
If you want to create an effective blog content strategy, you must know what you want to obtain in terms of results and benefits. These are some relevant business goals for a company blog:
- Raise awareness about your business
- Grow the authority of the brand
- Attract leads
- Convert leads into customers
- Keep existing customers engaged.
Each company has different goals depending on how long they have been in business, what challenges they face and what kind of brand image they want to promote.
Step 2: Identify Your Customers’ Needs and Interests
Here is one of the trickiest parts when you create an effective blog content strategy. Although your blog is focused on promoting your business goals, you must write for your audience.
This means, that your choice of topics and the tone of voice must be what your readers enjoy, not what you enjoy reading. This is one of the biggest errors that lead to failure and lost customers. The blog must be THEIR go-to source of information, not YOUR tool for tooting your own horn.
Step 3: Include Popular Content Formats
A blog must offer variety, both in terms of topics and content formats. When you create an effective blog content strategy, find the right proportion of:
- Blog articles
- Long form content (in-depth guides, whitepapers)
- Infographics
- Videos.
A successful blog keeps its readers informed and entertained – not bored.
Step 4: Create an Editorial Calendar
How frequently will you publish new content on your website? This depends on various aspects, such as:
- New blogs should build up content at a fast rate
- The requirements of your industry and niche (fashion brands post more frequently than law firms or insurance companies)
- Your ability to create quality content in various formats (an infographic takes less time to create than a whitepaper).
The editorial calendar must be your daily companion. You must always know when the next post should be published. And, whenever you have some unexpected spare time, consider using it to build up a stock of blog content.
Step 5: Determine KPIs for Your Blog
This is the last step in our guide to create an effective blog content strategy, and one of the most overlooked by beginner marketers and business owners. You must define the metrics that measure the success of your blog. What kind of results do you want to see? And how soon should you see them?
Starting from increased organic traffic to your site to more sales, each metric must be clearly defined, with all its parameters: how much (quantity), how well (quality) and how soon (timeframe).