How To Develop a Blog Content Strategy That Works

An effective blog can be a powerful tool in your brand’s marketing mix. It has the potential to help you develop a more robust audience and a larger customer base for your business. Despite this, many business owners and marketing managers are unsure of how to develop a blog content strategy that is successful. Delving into blogging tactics that work will help you get the most from your business blog.

Success for Your Blog Is Success for Your Business

Before exploring blog strategies for your business, it is helpful to understand why they are important and what success looks like. Typically, business blogs are centerpieces of those brands’ content marketing strategies. Here are four ways a blog can help your business:

1. Establish Brand Authority

There are more entities doing business than ever before. For most brands, simply having a good product or service is not enough to stand out from competitors. Instead, it is important to be seen as an authority in your field. Learning how to develop a blog content strategy is all about building authority through your words. This expertise increases the confidence of potential customers and leads to greater conversion rates.

2. Enhance Customer Relationships

Your blog content marketing strategy can help you engage with your audience. A blog gives people a free and accessible way to interact with your brand. They don’t have to be ready to make a purchase to read a blog post. This makes blog content a valuable tool for bringing prospects into your sales funnel.

3. Strengthen SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization is a valuable but ever-changing online marketing technique. While the algorithms for Google and other search engines may change, their goal of delivering high-value content to users is unwavering. Learn how to develop a blog content strategy and regularly update your website with new, relevant and engaging content in order to increase traffic.

4. Offer Opportunities To Share

Well-written and valuable blog content is ideal for sharing. If your blog content is worth reading, it is likely worth sharing. Make it easy for your audience to share your content with friends and family. Soon, you will start to see a growing audience for your blog and your brand.

In short, blogs can be very valuable. To develop a strategy that will help realize these potential benefits, it is helpful to set some goals.

Find Success With Your Blog Content Marketing Strategy

The definition of success for web content varies between organizations. For example, you may have your web content writers focus on brand expertise. You could measure this based on research on your audience’s perceptions of your brand. Alternatively, you may be most interested in growing your audience through sharing. Therefore, your definition of success may involve the number of shares.

As with any other business project, your blog will be most successful when you have effective goals. Consider using a framework such as SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and time-bound) to help you create better goals. Regardless of what goals you set, make sure you have some objective you are trying to achieve. This will help you as you learn how to develop a blog content strategy in a way that you can hit the ground running when you hire content writers.

Some relevant key performance indicators for blogs include page views, average time spent on the page, conversion to product pages, product sales and article shares. Of course, there’s a lot more data that you can track and analyze. One of the great things about digital marketing is the immense opportunity for analytics.

How To Develop Blog Strategies That Work

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for blogging. Remember, every business will have unique goals for its blog. Therefore, the strategy needs to be bespoke.

No matter what your goals are, however, there are a few key considerations that you should take into account. Most significantly, you should think about these three considerations:

1. The visitor’s intent
2. Your unique selling points, and
3. How the blog fits into your sales pipeline

With your goals and these three considerations in mind, the path forward to develop your blog content marketing strategy will start to become clearer. Let’s go more in-depth with why these considerations are important.

1. Think About the Visitor’s Intent

As you craft your first blog post, the most important question is, “Who will read it?” More specifically, you must understand what your readers are interested in before they even reach the content. This is typically dictated by the search term used by the visitor to find the blog post. There are three main categories of search terms:

• Informational: These searches seek the answer to a question. For example, if your business sells camping supplies, you may be interested in optimizing content to rank for the phrase “what do I need to camp for the first time?”
• Navigational: Searches in this category are trying to find specific resources. Your goal should be to own the navigational results for your brand. If someone looks for “John’s Camping Supplies,” for example, your camping business should be all the top results.
• Transactional: These are searches with an intent to buy. They may be generic or specific to your catalog. For example, the user may look for “John’s Camping Supplies large tent” or “large tent for sale.” Both can be transactional searches.

Understanding a visitor’s intent is important when learning how to develop a blog content strategy that works. You can make a lot of predictions about the audience for your blog based on the key terms used to reach it. For example, to garner results for informational searches, you could target a blog post about tips for beginner campers. For transactional searches, you could make a post detailing your summer camping sale.

2. Know and Share Your Unique Selling Points

The internet is a powerful tool. It gives even the smallest brands a way to share their messages on a global scale. Unfortunately, this also means that your brand’s signal needs to break through a lot of noise from direct and indirect competitors.

Before you set your website content writers working, you will need to identify the characteristics that make your brand and products unique. The best tips on how to develop a blog content strategy are about making you different, better and special. You have most likely already explored your USPs (unique selling points) for your broader marketing strategy. Use them to help guide your content creation. For example, if your product is very intuitive, write content targeted to beginners who want an easy way to get started.

Additionally, you can turn your blog content into a USP of its own. Build a value proposition that includes the information and expertise in your blog posts. For example, John’s Camping Supplies may create a series of guides about the best camping sites in the region that include recommendations on equipment for each site and how to use those supplies. The content becomes a USP for the products.

3. Integrate Your Content Into Your Sales Pipeline

A web content writer is more than just someone writing blog posts. He or she is also an important part of your sales pipeline. Your business’s blog content marketing strategy presents a valuable opportunity to capture leads and bring them into your funnel. Your calls to action in your blog should be based on the sales funnel stage that the reader is currently in.

Learning how to develop a blog content strategy with the sales funnel in mind can be greatly beneficial. The traditional sales funnel starts with awareness, then research, followed by evaluation until the customer makes a purchase decision. Each stage of the funnel should be targeted with appropriate content. These stages can often be mapped to search intents.

Consumers at the awareness stage may be interested in highly informational content that will help them begin to address a pressing need. Conversely, someone preparing to make a purchase is likely interested in transactional content that will inform a final decision. In the former case, your call to action may encourage readers to learn more about the topic. In the latter case, your call to action may persuade them to purchase a product.

Bring It All Together

Once you have considered the above three elements of your blog content marketing strategy, the right approach to blogging should begin to become clearer. Using these insights, you can plan some pieces of content that will work well for your goals. It is helpful to organize these with a consistent schedule. The SEO benefits of blogging are enhanced by regular, high-quality content.

It is also helpful to implement analytics to help track your key performance indicators. Using these KPIs, you can hone in your strategy to better suit the needs of your brand. If you are also tracking your organic search terms, you will have more insight into which blogs are attracting different types of search intent.

Building an effective blog can offer substantial benefits. However, it is not an easy undertaking, especially when first learning how to develop a blog content strategy. There are millions of other brands hoping to attract attention through content marketing. You should consider whether you want to hire content writer services or use an in-house team.

Why It’s Valuable To Hire a Content Writer To Develop Your Blog Content Marketing Strategy

Many small business owners want to handle a lot of their marketing efforts themselves. They expect that this will help them save money. However, this raises the question of whether a “jack of all trades” business owner can fully realize the potential of blogging and other forms of marketing.

Content marketing is very effective when done properly. However, it can also be quite time-consuming. A web content writer can spend hours writing each blog post. That isn’t including the necessary time to analyze the data and identify keywords, intents and strategy.

Reasons To Hire a Writer

When it comes to knowing how to develop a blog content strategy, it’s important to consider all the possible tools in your belt. Here are a few reasons to hire a content writer:

• They have experience. A web content writer is experienced with creating high-quality blog posts and other content. A professional can use that experience to make your blog content marketing strategy as effective as possible.
• They can be more consistent. Consistency is important in content marketing. A website content writer can keep your content schedule running smoothly.
• They have a more objective view of your business. You love your business. This can be a great thing. However, it may cloud your judgment sometimes. Having a third-party perspective can be valuable.
• They can focus exclusively on your blog. You’re a busy person. Get more from your blog by hiring someone to focus exclusively on that part of your business. You’ll also have more time to focus on other areas.

Explore BKA Content’s Services

If you want to hire content writer services for your blog, consider BKA Content. We offer a variety of services, including a monthly subscription plan.

Get in touch with our team to learn how to develop a blog content strategy with our help and publish all kinds of high-quality content for your business.