Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger, said, “These days, people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched to.”
This quote sums up the importance of the entire blogging industry.
When people want to buy products, and they research them, your blog might be their first touchpoint with your brand. You need to leave a great impression so that they keep coming back while you move them closer to the bottom of your selling funnel.
A good blogging strategy will help you do just that. By following the ”give before you take” principle, you can provide your audience with information to help solve the problem and instill trust in you.
A good content strategy can help you:
- Increase traffic
- Build trust with your audience
- Find quality leads
- Increase sales, average conversion rate from SEO, and revenue
Let’s see how you can create a successful blog content marketing strategy for your business in 2021.
1. Define Marketing Goals
Before you even start brainstorming and creating content, you need to first sit down and write out your goals. Why?
Setting goals will help you determine what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to increase conversion rate, launch a new product, increase traffic, or do something else?
Your goals should follow the SMART principle:
S- Specific
M- Measurable
A-Achievable
R-Relevant
T-Timely
In simple words, following the SMART principle helps you set realistic and achievable goals that you can produce on time.
For example, your content marketing goals can be:
- Increase website traffic by 50% in 6 months
- Get 1000 email subscribers in 4 months
- Rank in the top 3 on Google’s first page within 5 months.
- Increase sales by 60% in one month
2. Buyer’s Persona
When asked ‘’Who do you want to target?’’ most businesses will say, ‘’Umm, everyone’.’ This is where they fail.
Not everyone is a suitable target for your blog or products. Period.
You don’t want to target hardcore meat eaters if you are a vegan lifestyle blog. They won’t agree with you. They won’t buy from you. Not only that, they won’t interact with your brand. To reach the right audience, you need to identify those who have a problem you can help to solve.
So, first, what is a buyer’s persona?
A buyer’s persona is a fictional character that represents your target customers. You can collect points from your research to help create a buyer’s persona.
To get started with creating a buyer’s persona, you will need the following points.
- Age
- Gender
- Country
- Unique challenges
- Profession
- Income
For example, if you are a SaaS company selling an email marketing solution, your buyer’s persona would include businesses who want to start email marketing and change their email marketing solutions.
3. Content Cluster by Topics
Now that you know your ideal buyer’s persona, it’s time to find the topics to write about.
A good way to find content topics is to find common links between your audience’s pain points and interests.
To find your content clusters, follow the steps below:
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Brainstorm Your Topics
If your blog is related to yoga, then you can start with ‘’How to do Yoga Properly?’’, and ‘’Best time for Yoga’’, for example.
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Keyword Research
After brainstorming topics, you must research whether these topics have high demand or not. After all, what’s the point of writing something your audience doesn’t want to read?
You can use keyword research tools like SEMrush, Keyword Planner, and Ahrefs to help you find the best keywords to target.
Now that you have got content topics, it’s time for some content creation.
4. Content Creation and Promotion
Execution is as important as proper planning. If you keep planning with little to no execution, you won’t see results.
In the previous step, you found topics and keywords to write. Now for the most important and least followed step: Promotion.
Most people spend a long time creating ‘perfect’ content and even hit the publish button. And then they wait for high volumes of traffic, high-quality leads, and sales to pour in. But, when this does not happen, they will throw their hands in the air, start throwing tantrums saying, ‘blogging is dead,’, ‘’content marketing no longer works,’, and so on.
The problem is they never promoted content firsthand. There are millions of websites on the internet. It is highly unlikely that people will automatically discover their posts “organically.” To avoid falling into such a trap, promote your content across various channels as soon as you hit publish.
Some channels you can use to promote your content are:
- Social media
- Paid ads
- Organic search aka SEO
Wrapping Up
A proper blog content marketing strategy can help you skyrocket your business to new heights. But first, don’t forget to make sure your blog solves your audience’s problems before trying to sell them anything. And then follow the step-by-step guide above to get started with your content marketing strategy.
What are your thoughts on blog content marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments section below.
