Did you know that more than 50% of marketers now find blogging their most important inbound marketing tool? For these marketers, blogging offers them 67% more leads than if they didn’t invest in it.
In an environment where the internet is the new battleground for customers, having a high performing blog is vital. However, an exceptionally performing blog doesn’t come by chance – it takes consistent effort.
Here’s a closer look at five guiding pointers when building a strategy for blogs that your business can count on.
1. Set Your Objectives
Before you dive deeper into starting or developing your blog, you need to decide on the overarching objectives you’re targeting. That’s because a focused blog is one that stays in the long run and outperforms competitors.
A good way to uncover your objectives is to figure out what outcome you want your content to deliver. What would you like to see your blog achieve? Don’t look at the return on investment (ROI) from a vague perspective, but rather seek to distill it into defined points.
Let’s say you want your blog to help drive more conversions leading to more sales. You’ll need to focus your entire blog strategy on a target audience in the latter stage of the buying process. If you gear such a blog towards leads starting their buying journey, it won’t yield the best results.
The more defined your overall objective for the blog is, the more efficiently you will drive every effort in achieving that outcome.
2. Figure Your Target Audience Out
Once you know what you want your blog to achieve, you need to analyze your target audience. It’s only after you are intimately familiar with the people you want your blog to reach that you can communicate effectively.
To better understand your target audience, you need to build a buyer persona. A buyer persona is the representation of your ideal target customer based on your market research data. That data includes customer demographics and other relevant identifiers.
When creating a buyer persona, you need to look at both ideal and negative cases.
The ideal profile will help you understand what customers your blog is looking to communicate with. On the other hand, a negative profile gives you insight into the type of customer your blog isn’t meant to reach. That becomes quite useful in helping you direct your efforts to avoid wasting time and resources marketing to the wrong crowd.
The more detail you can unearth to feed into your buyer persona, the more meaningful the insights you can mine. With these insights, you can tailor-make blog content relevant to your audience, which drives the right inbound traffic.
3. Market Your Blog
Just like your business, your blog needs marketing to draw in an audience and grow sustainably. That means marketing both your website and your blog material across various channels your customers most prefer.
You should speed up your site, so you don’t lose visitors who get frustrated by your blog loading slowly. On top of that, you need to invest in both paid and organic traffic.
Organic traffic is mainly gained through consistent search engine optimization (SEO). The beauty of organic traffic is that you’re drawing in prospects who have a need that your content can help them solve, hence having buy-in.
Paid traffic to your site, and blog, is also essential as it puts your content in front of the right clients. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are critical in letting the right target audience know about your website and blog.
Remember that buyer persona you developed? It comes in handy as you can pull data from it to understand your target audience and thus develop ad copy that resonates with them. Pair such personalized copy with the skills of a seasoned PPC specialist, and you have a winning campaign on your hands.
By combining paid and organic traffic to your site, you can achieve consistent growth for your blog.
4. Be Consistent
One thing you need to realize about blogging is that it’s not a quick fix. Instead, it’s more like a long-term relationship you take up – you’re in it for the long haul.
It takes time to attract your target audience’s attention and emerge as an authoritative brand in their eyes. That takes several touchpoints, and it’s when you blog consistently that you cultivate such a relationship with your audience.
To achieve this, you should budget your time. Here, you’ll be looking to carve out consistent times on your daily schedule, where you work on developing new content and marketing your existing material.
Developing a particular schedule for your blog helps you build it into your daily tasks. When you face tough days with little to no inspiration, you’ll be able to navigate them as it’s a habit you’ve nurtured.
Since everyone works differently, you need to identify the best hours for you to work on the blog. Keep in mind that developing content is only one aspect of it. You’ll still need to spend time marketing it, researching topics, and keywords, among others.
The reliability that a consistent schedule delivers will let your target audience know they can rely on your blog for new insights. Over time, that keeps your business top of mind, besides growing your authority in their eyes.
5. Vary Your Content
Blogging has typically been primarily text-based. While this continues to be a dominant content form, it takes time to craft exceptional content. You need to find ways to incorporate other forms of content in your blog to have a different approach to connecting with your target audience.
For example, you can look at some of your top-performing blog posts and develop rich infographics for them. That gives a visual summary of the material that appeals to your target audience while being easier to develop.
Such an approach gives you the variety your audience loves while simultaneously enabling you to balance the effort it takes to run your blog sustainably.
Are You Using the Right Strategy for Blogs to Grow Your Audience?
There’s no question about it – blogging is now an indispensable business marketing tool. However, in a rush to capitalize on this insight, many firms develop a poor-quality blog that delivers little return. Invest in uncovering the right strategy for blogs that can sustainably support your blog for the long haul as you serve your target audience.
An exceptional blog is foundational to today’s business success, but it’s part of a wider array of business skills. Our blog offers valuable tips and insights to help you become a well-rounded entrepreneur. Check out more of our posts to learn how to better your business.
