These days the consumers expect to be educated before they buy. Education-based marketing is not new, but today, it’s very important for businesses of all sizes, and in all industries. And one of the best ways to educate and build authority in the marketplace is to have a solid blogging strategy in place.
According to a recent inbound marketing report, nearly 80% of companies which use blogging as part of their marketing strategy report acquiring customers through their blogging efforts. Additionally, 82% of businesses admit that blogging is now critical to their business.
But blogging, like any business activity, needs to have both a purpose and a plan to ensure that you’re getting the best results from the time and resources invested. This means having a blogging strategy that’s focused on achieving your desired business goals.
A blogging strategy is a comprehensive plan which outlines the essential steps you need to follow when creating your blog and blog posts.
Defining your goals
Developing your buyer personas
Analyzing your competition
Developing a keyword strategy
Creating a content calendar
Determine how to promote your blog
Failure to create a strategy, or follow it, can lead to a variety of critical issues, all of which will waste your time and resources.
For example, if you write a blog post without doing any keyword research, your post will get lost in the sea of Google and Bing search results, getting limited, if any, views from your target audience.
Having a blogging strategy, and planning out a blog calendar in advance, will ensure that you post strategically and successfully.
Understanding the value of blogging, and its specific business benefits are essential to helping you stay committed to the process.
Here are five specific benefits that a blogging strategy will give your business
1. Blogging can help you build your brand
Blogging provides your business with two key benefits.
Develop your brand and create more brand awareness.
Many businesses write blog posts without a schedule or plan, posting randomly. That approach will not be nearly as effective, nor cohesive as it would be if you took the time to create a blogging strategy. Having a blogging strategy will help you stay organized and consistent, helping you create a powerful brand image.
By having this singular, powerful brand image, you’ll make clear to your ideal clients:
Who you are
What you stand for
Whom you help
2. Blogging will increase your authority – Become an expert
Blogging done correctly can also help you establish authority on your focus topic/s, or niche, increasing a sense of trust your readers feel toward your brand. That will also help you with your broader business goals because people buy from people they know, like and trust.
You can blog on all kinds of topics related to your industry, but if your posts don’t address the key needs or challenges of your ideal clients – using the language that they commonly use – they won’t resonate with your ideal clients. Nor will your posts prompt them to reach out to you for a solution to their problem/challenge.
Solving the challenges of your ideal clients through high-quality content will increase your authority, and perhaps even position you as an influencer in your industry.
3. Blogging will increase traffic from search engines
While you can increase traffic to your blog in many ways, you cannot overlook the value of organic traffic – traffic you get from search engine results.
Showing up organically on the first page of the search engine results, for the topics your ideal clients search for, will create a strong, positive impression in their minds, and can greatly increase the number of people reading your blog.
Without SEO, you could be losing thousands, or even tens of thousands, of eyeballs on your content. With all the information out there competing for readers’ attention, your posts must show up high in the search engine results.
Tip
When you create new content, search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, will crawl your site to index this fresh content. The best way to achieve better results in search engines is to purposefully incorporate search engine optimization into your blogging strategy.
This means pre-planning the keyword phrase each post will focus on, adding appropriate headers, sub-headers, tags, internal and external links and optimizing your site for mobile.
4. Blogging can help you to engage your target audience
Your blog content enables you to facilitate important discussions in your industry, and build a community of people interested by, and engaged with, your posts.
These discussions can help you shape the future of your business – by communicating with your target market, listening to what they want and need, and providing high-quality content for them, you will encourage them to keep engaging with you.
To achieve that level of engagement, you have to employ a strategic and intentional approach to blogging. When creating your blogging strategy, include content that will foster valuable discussions about current or ongoing issues within your industry, as well as any new or growing trends.
Remember, your ideal clients can find coverage of these topics in many places online – what makes your content unique is your perspective on the topic.
When people align with your point of view, they’ll not only read everything that you create, but they’ll share it too.
5. Blogging will generate leads for your business
Perhaps one of the most rewarding benefits of having a well thought out blogging strategy is the conversion of your web traffic into leads.
These are qualified leads, with whom you’ve built some trust and authority through the content you’ve shared, and who knows who you are, whom you help and what you offer.
That’s why all good blogging strategies should include the creation of one or more lead magnets.
A lead magnet provides value through content, solving a very specific problem in exchange for an opt-in (being added to your email list).
When you identify a common issue your ideal clients struggle with, use it to create a more detailed piece of educational content in the form of a lead magnet.
Once you have one or more lead magnets, you can use several strategies to convert your blog readers into leads. Keep in mind, your lead magnet must:
Be interesting enough for someone to give up their email address for
Be something that can be consumed quickly or easily
It’s great to have a blogging strategy for your business, but simply having one in place is not enough.
The business benefits of blogging are immense for those who do it strategically and consistently. The most important part of any blogging strategy is to put it into action and keep your process on track.
Take action today. Create an effective blogging strategy and attract your target audience to grow your business.
P.S.
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