Your blog content strategy should be a key pillar in your overall approach to content marketing. Afterall, search dominates online traffic, and blogging is one of the best ways to get more search rankings.
There are so many types of content that it’s overwhelming to know what to create. Because blogging is so profitable, it remains the most important content format for many organizations, particularly B2B companies looking to lower their advertising spend.
How to develop a blog content strategy
To create a blog content strategy, you need to start with a deep understanding of how your customers buy from you and what they are looking for. This will drive your SEO strategy and how you prioritize what needs to get written first.
Step 1. Understand the customer buying journey
In sales-led organizations, where the sales team drives most of the revenue growth, the customer lifecycle is quite long and typically follows these 8 stages:
- Awareness
- Research
- Consideration
- Selection
- Buying
- Satisfaction
- Retention and Loyalty
- Advocacy
But in product-led organizations, the goal is to get as many leads as possible, and convert those users into customers (without effort from sales for the majority of the product-qualified leads). So for those types of orgs, there might be some enterprise customers that go through the above cycle, and then small businesses who progress much faster.
Regardless of how your business drives revenue, you need to create content for every stage of your ideal customers’ unique journey.
Step 2. Do your keyphrase research
With a deeper understanding of the customer journey, you can now do keyphrase research.
The majority of your new blog content should be for the Awareness, Research, Consideration, and Selection stages. The other 4 stages might account for 10 - 15% of your blogging strategy.
You can use SEO tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to find keyphrases that you want to target, based on their search volume and difficulty scores. Doing your own research can be difficult, so you van hire professional parties such as Add Valore to do research for your enterprise.
Make sure to write blogs that target both competitive and non-competitive keyphrases across all of your buying cycle stages.
Competitor research is a smart way to drive SEO research too. Just pop your competitors’ URLs into your SEO tool to find out what they’re ranking for, and add the relevant terms to your spreadsheet of target keyphrases.
You’ll then use the keyphrases to come up with great blog headlines. For example the keyphrase “content marketing plan” could turn into the headline “How to Develop a Content Marketing Plan That Delivers Leads.”
Step 3. Set a posting schedule
Next, you’ll need to set a blogging schedule based on your available resources. Set goals for how many blogs you’ll post and where you'll post it.
Keep in mind that some keyphrases are best targeted with long form blog posts, so you could set a word count goal too.
For example, if your goal is 10,000 words per month, then you could have three 3500-word posts in one month, and then five 2000-word posts the next month.
By setting a goal for your content team, you’ll really commit to blogging, instead of just waiting for enough time to magically appear.
Step 4. Promote your blogs based on their type and priority
Your blog content strategy should also include promotion. You shouldn’t promote all blog posts in the same way.
Make sure that you create your own blog promotion plans as part of your overall strategy.
Here’s an example of different types of blogs and how to promote them.
- SEO mega guides - Since the focus is SEO, you might prioritze link building, and also post them to social media using an evergreen posting strategy (posting every month or every other month, for example).
- Customer stories - You might email them to your list of leads, encouage sales reps to share them on social media, and even run paid social ads to them.
- Expert roundups - You’ll want to share these on all your social media channels and tag everyone who participated. You might also create micro content (like inforgraphis or short videos) with the tips to repurpose on social media directly.
Consider your content formats and categories and create a promotion plan for each.
Step 5. Have a plan in place for conversion rate optimization
Because blogging focuses so much on SEO, it’s easy to let conversion rate optimization (CRO) slide. But make sure you have a member of your team who is paying attention to conversions.
This marketer should track blog posts and campaigns for some or all of these:
- Email subscriptions
- New trial sign ups
- Lead magnet downloads
- Demo requests
- Closed deals
Continually improve the conversion rate of your blog posts by adjusting your side bar, changing your CTA graphics, or adding more enticing lead magnets.
10 reasons your content strategy must include blogging
Not fully convinced of blogging’s importance? These 15 reasons will show you exactly why you shouldn’t delay your strategy or implementation planning.
1. You'll generate 3x more leads via blogs than through ads
If you have an effective content marketing strategy, then the results you get from blogging will far surpass any short-term traffic from temporary search ads.
2. Blogging drives traffic to your website and is perfect for SEO.
Blogging helps you drive traffic to your website from social media and from SEO. Blogs give people a reason to return to your website over and over again.
3. Blogging provides 4x the likelihood of being found in organic search
You can't afford not to have a quality blog for your business.
Companies that blog are 4x more likely to be found high in organic search results.
Plus, companies that blog have 97% more inbound links. More inbound links means a greater domain authority, which means all of your upcoming content has a higher chance of ranking via search too. Woo hoo!
4. 52% of marketers agree that blogging is the most critical marketing tactic
In a recent content marketing survey of 2,562 marketers worldwide, 52% of markters defined blogging as their most critical marketing tactic.
Interestingly, only 40% of marketers determined that email marketing and social media were critical. What about video? It was voted as "critical" by just 30% of marketers. So go ahead and buy into the video hype if you want, but don't ditch blogging.
5. Blogging magnifies your brand
If you've got your finger on the pulse of industry trends and your clients' needs, then you already know that your company blog is the perfect platform to remain true to your brand and create authority as an expert.
6. Blog posts help build a long-lasting content machine
There's a reason why blogs like Hubspot's gets over a million visits through organic search engine results alone.
They've invested in their blogging and powered their way through to an SEO-driven content library, and now their blogs are working for them while they sleep.
In order to keep your content fresh in the eyes of your readers and Google, you should:
- Use Google Analytics and/or Revive to find posts that are losing rankings and search traffic
- Update these posts with new images (including alt tags), add 100 - 500 words, and edit or remove any parts that are no longer accurate or up to date
7. Your blogs are an opportunity for transparency
Among other things, Buffer is known for their transparency and willingness to share best practices. There's no better way to show your company's core values than through honest two-way communication, which blogging affords you from the get-go.
If you're a startup, then get on the path to sharing and starting those conversations early on.
8. Blogging showcases your WHY
Every brand has a "why" for existing. Why do you offer the product or service that you do? What do you hope to bring to the market? Why do you care? These values should be a part of your brand, and they should be infused in your website, but your blog gives you an opportunity to take it one step further.
Blogging can help you showcase your passion for the problem you solve.
You can do this best with:
- Employee or customer thought leadership
- Customer interviews or spotlights
- CEO thought leadership
- Manifestos or more revolutionary / call-to-arms style posts
9. Google likes blogging as a content marketing strategy
It's true.
Google decided years ago that longer blogging posts should rank more favorably because of the opportunities for relevant backlinks in evergreen content (serving as your blog's cornerstones).
The reader would have to, in turn, stay on said page longer in order to read the in-depth content, therefore establishing credibility for the site.
It's no wonder that bloggers are increasingly opting for long-form content.
10. Summarizing key takeaways helps please your audience and boosts SEO
There are so many other different types of content you might want to create, but blogging is still the pinnacle. It's the hub at the center of the wheel. Without a high quality blog, you miss out on the chance to grow your brand, increase website traffic, and promote your offers.
Blogging is an outstandding way to let the public (and search engines) know what to find on your site and diplay your authority. People ussually want to get to know you before doing business and blogging can give them a sneak peak in your day 2 day life. Don't underestimate the power of blogging (for your SEO) and reach out if you need help.
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