A blog is often the most important part of a company’s content marketing strategy. This is because the blog is where all of the company’s seed content is created. This content is then used to build a unique identity for the company’s brand. Because of this, it is not surprising that one of the top priorities for every content marketer is to build a strong blog content strategy. According to a report by Hubspot, companies that have a blog convert 67% more leads than companies that do not have a blog. The report also found that businesses that regularly blog see greater returns on investment.
Blog Audience & Goal Setting
The most important thing for a blog to be successful is to understand who it is catering to and what it is trying to achieve. So, before you start creating content, you must identify your target audience and define your goals.
Identify Your Core Audience
You cannot create a brand that would appeal to everyone. It is important to first find out who would be interested in the product or services you offer. This will determine who the core audience for your blog would be.
You will only be able to create content that is successful in attracting readers if you know who you are writing for. Do some research to identify your target customer base, which will give you your target audience. You can do this by creating ideal buyer personas that are most likely to convert. All the content you create later will be based on the buyer personas you are targeting.
Define Your Content’s Goals
Now that you have an idea of your target audience, it is time to clearly define what you want to achieve with your blog content. Of course, conversions and a strong brand image are the ultimate goals, but how does your content help achieve these?
Define your goals for your content. This includes whether you want to create awareness about your brand, sell products, or answer audience questions. These content goals will help determine the type of blog content you produce.
If you’re unsure about what you want to accomplish with your blog, look into what sort of content your audience wants to read. Oftentimes, audiences are attracted to material that takes a problem-solving approach. Determining your target audience’s pain points can give you some ideas for what kind of content to write. You can decide which customer questions or issues you would like to address and what you hope to achieve by doing so.
Building a Blog Content Strategy
The next step is to develop a content strategy. This will involve deciding what kind of content to create and how it will perform in the market.
To develop a content strategy that delivers results, you will need to consider the following factors.
Set Yourself Apart
If you want your blog content to convert leads, you will need to make your blog stand out from the millions of others online. You can do this by being different and getting noticed. You will need to plan carefully to make this happen.
Talk More About What You Have to Offer
Your brand should be the focus of your content. Talk about the problems you can solve for a prospective customer. You may not need to mention your product or service directly, but you can write your content in a way that draws attention to your brand.
Use More Relevant and Engaging Visuals
Make your content more engaging by adding visuals that will catch the reader’s attention. Relevant pictures and charts will help make your point more effectively.
Write Posts About Your Business’ and Customers’ Unique Experiences and Issues
A business’ reputation is important in today’s competitive market, as it can influence other potential customers. Therefore, many sites encourage customers to write reviews. For example, Microsoft has a web page where customers can share their experiences.
An article in the Harvard Business Review emphasizes the importance of customer stories to illustrate a company’s purpose statement. The post gives examples of how real-life experiences of customers have been instrumental in trust building for the companies.
A woman spoke about how much it meant to her and her family when a driver from Lyft, a ride-sharing company based in San Francisco, helped her daughter out of a difficult situation. She described how this act portrayed the company’s encouragement of building human connections.
Customer success stories are an authentic way to build your brand and convey your message. Prospective customers look for this type of information when making purchasing decisions.
Show Your Expertise in Your Field
Finally, demonstrating your abilities is the best way to stand out from your rivals. Show that you’re an expert on the topic you’re discussing. Do thorough research on anything you plan to write about and share accurate and useful information. Your expertise and understanding of the subject should be your unique selling point.
Address Your Audience’s Burning Issues
You don’t want your blog to just be a marketing tool. It should be able to attract the audience by catering to their needs first and then discreetly directing them to your site. One way to make sure you have your audience’s attention is by talking about their pain points.
You can learn what issues your target audience is facing by doing simple online research. For example, if you want to reach mothers of newborns, just search for “mothers of newborns” online. You’ll find many online forums and social media pages related to this topic. People often post queries on these forums, looking for answers from their peers. By reading these posts, you can get a good sense of what is affecting the majority of your target audience. Then, you can write a post offering a unique solution to their problem.
Other channels such as live chat on your website, an online survey, or reviews on other related sites can also be used to find out audience pain points. However, don’t reveal everything in a blog post. For those who want to know more, ask them to register their email or visit your website. This is an effective way to generate leads.
Highlight your post about a burning issue on all your promotional tools. In your email alerts and social posts, make sure to mention that you have an answer to people’s problems.
Attract the Right Visitors With Great Content
If you want to attract blog subscribers, start by creating great content.
If your content fails to address the questions your audience is seeking answers to, you will have difficulty convincing anyone to subscribe to your blog.
If you want to figure out which topics your readers are interested in, you have to put in the effort to do some research on your potential audience.
Answer the Public is one of our favorite content research tools for discovering great blog post ideas.
Create High Converting Optin Forms
Even if your content is helpful and provides readers with answers to their questions, they are likely to only read that one post and then leave your site.
70% of people who visit websites only visit once and never come back.
It is important to hold the interest of your viewers and persuade them to sign up before they leave your website forever.
Popups are a very effective way of getting subscribers as they are difficult to ignore.
If popups aren’t your style, then there are plenty of other optin types to choose from, like:
- Slide-ins: Animated optins that slide in from the side of your page are eye-catching but still off to the side so they don’t interrupt readers.
- Floating bars: Not a fan of content blocking popups? A floating bar that sticks to the top or bottom of the page is attention-grabbing without bothering your visitors.
- Inline Optins: How about placing an optin right in the middle of your post? You know you’ve already got their attention. This also works great if you hide the rest of the content until they subscribe, using a content lock optin.
- After Post Optins: After a visitor finishes reading your whole post, they’re primed and ready to subscribe. Promise them similar great content and they’ll be happy to provide their email address.
You may need to give potential subscribers a reason to sign up for your email list. Telling people to subscribe to your email list may not be enough to convince them; every other website is asking for email addresses these days. You may need to give potential subscribers a reason to sign up for your email list.
In order to persuade someone to do something, it is beneficial to offer something in return.
Bribe Readers to Become Subscribers
If you have great content, sometimes people just need an additional incentive.
We recommend giving subscribers something, like a lead magnet, in exchange for their email. A simple checklist, cheat sheet, or worksheet can provide a powerful incentive.
If you’re looking for ideas for lead magnets, we have a list that can help give you some inspiration. However, if you want to put one together quickly, the easiest way to do so is by using your existing blog content.
Look for a post on your blog that is popular and has gotten a lot of views. It should be around 1000 words or more so that it can be turned into a good eBook.
You can create your eBook by copying the content into your favorite word processor (such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs) and saving the document as a PDF.
If you want to increase the number of people who sign up for your email list, try offering a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer in exchange for an email address. This is much more effective than simply asking people for their email address.
Each person who visits your website is different and has different interests and needs. Not everyone will want the same lead magnet.
Create Targeted Optins
You will only get so far using the same optin form on every page.
If you want to increase your email list dramatically, the best way to do that is to create opt-ins that are targeted to each reader.
The more relevant your optin campaigns are to your blog, the more likely people are to subscribe.
Even if you only create an opt-in that is specific to the content of a single page or just two or three posts, it can make a significant difference in the number of signups.
A lead magnet that is specific to one blog post is called a content upgrade and is an effective method we recommend.
Content upgrades are a great way to increase conversion rates. In one example, a content upgrade of a hand-picked list of the top 10 best book promotion sites, increased conversion rates by 9.9%.
To create your content upgrade, select a blog post that is more popular than your other posts to use as a foundation.
Then take a look at your post, and brainstorm for content upgrade ideas:
If you have a list of resources in your post, you could offer a downloadable PDF with additional information.
If you’re creating a tutorial, you can make a PDF checklist or worksheet for your readers to use as they follow your instructions.
If you have a blog, you could create audio recordings of yourself reading your blog posts. This would offer your audience another way to consume your content.
You could also turn the blog post itself into your content upgrade by hiding part of the post until the reader subscribes. Follow our content locking tutorial for a step-by-step guide to quickly set this up on your blog.