Content marketing is essential to ensuring that your business stands out from competitors. Implementing superior content marketing is the key to survival for many SMEs due to the increasing popularity of web-based marketing and e-commerce opportunities. 

One of the most impactful additions to your content will be enacting an effective blog content strategy that will make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your site. By doing this, your site will be seen as trustworthy and reliable in providing information about a topic relevant to your particular niche. In addition, by creating new, exciting content, you will encourage return visitors and increase traffic to your site. 

What Is a Blog Content Strategy?

When adding content to your site, such as blogs, you must consider larger goals than just posting the content. Blog content strategies will help you develop long-term plans for your business’s online presence. The main point to consider is what benefit these blog posts provide your audience and website and how they will assist you in increasing sales. 

When developing your blog content strategy, you will be encouraged to think about your objective for your content marketing. It would be best to look at who your target audience is and where this content will sit in a user’s journey. By taking this strategic, goal-orientated approach to your work, you can focus on choosing specific keywords and topics that are the most relevant to your business. 

Developing a Blog Content Strategy

When developing your brand’s blog content strategy, it’s essential to have a firm grasp of the purpose of the content and what audience it’s aimed for. 

What’s the aim of your content?

There are several questions to consider, and the answers will assist you in deciding the purpose of your content. 

• What question will this content answer for your audience?
• What should the reader do after reading it?
• Do you want to raise brand awareness or become a thought leader?
• Do you want to boost your ranking and increase traffic to your site?
• Is your content designed to fulfil a specific step in your marketing funnel?

Tangible goals are the clearest and easiest to pursue. Blogs can have unique roles, but in general, all your blogs should achieve the same purpose for your brand. Longer content that is easy for your audience to share will increase your brand awareness. You can also develop your business into an industry leader by creating helpful guides that people can return to for vital answers to questions. 

You can design your content to drive users through a planned marketing funnel by clarifying where the next step in their journey should be. For example, creating content shared through industry forums, informative landing pages and email marketing for paid social campaigns. Share the content you create on platforms where users are already considering buying your product or requiring a service you provide. 

Target personas

Understanding your audience is an essential part of creating compelling content. Some ways you can find this information are to post surveys to existing customers or use online forums or on your social media platforms. By exploring the people already engaging with your brand, you can discover what elements unify them into being attracted to your business. Alternatively, you can observe and analyse the demographics of your competitors. 

It’s important to note that not every blog added needs to target every persona. Posting regularly will ensure your content is varied and targeted to a wide range of personas. 

Blog Content Strategy Structure 

A content plan should include the following elements:

• Blog categories and concepts
• Keywords the blog targets 
• Relevant internal links
• Publishing schedule
• Who is the content targeted at
• Where will it be shared for awareness

In addition, you can consider one of three types of content to help inspire your topic choices:

• Data-driven blogs – an SEO-friendly option that is aimed at increasing traffic to your site. This form of blog requires conducting keyword research to discover what currently has a high search volume and then create some content related to it. 
• Answering questions – investigate the questions that people need answers to relevant to your business. Creating content that answers these questions presents your audience with a helpful guide and encourages post-sharing or return visits. 
• Event blogs – seasonal events and national days are predictable events that a brand can embrace. By finding national days relevant to your brand, you can preemptively plan and create engaging content. Remember to balance these with relevant evergreen content throughout the year. 

Developing Your Blog Content Strategy

Remember to monitor your post’s performance and measure these results against your goals stated in the blog content strategy. For example, if one of your goals was to increase traffic, Google Analytics will show the number of visitors to your website and how many conversions or enquiries are related to your blog post. 

Storing feedback and ideas will assist you in building your strategy or revising it later to meet different goals. In addition, most businesses will have predictable lulls and highs based on seasonal events, and by reviewing feedback on posts around these times, you can work to get improved results next time. 

Brand awareness can be challenging to measure, but you can observe referring domains and see if users have shared links in your posts or analyse variations in branded organic traffic, referrals in analytics or social media shares. 

There is a lot to consider when creating an effective blog content marketing strategy; like many things, you get back what you put in. By investing the time into creating a truly effective blog content strategy, you will be able to see considerable improvements in your brand’s online presence. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you want assistance creating your blog content strategy.