From Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop to Walmart, brands have caught the blog marketing bug big-time. America’s best-known businesses have learned they can attract large, captive audiences through the strategic use of blogging. It’s a proven formula so easy any business with a website can copy it.
What is Blog Marketing Strategy?
A blog marketing strategy is a plan for publishing, maintaining and distributing valuable and relevant content to a defined target audience in order to attract, engage and acquire customers.
A successful blog strategy answers these questions:
- What business goals are you trying to achieve?
- How will blog marketing help you to reach these goals?
- What is your target audience?
- How can your blog satisfy your audience’s needs?
- What ideas and messages do you plan to communicate in your blogs?
- How often will you publish and on which platforms?
5 Benefits of a Blogging Strategy
Blog marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. It is an art that requires time, effort and, most of all, strategy. If done right, your company will enjoy these benefits.
1) Sets Goals
Without defined goals, many businesses publish blogs haphazardly with little or no set strategy. The result is few readers and even fewer sales conversions.
If you develop a blogging strategy, you will have the opportunity to set goals for your campaign.
- Do you have a number of visitors you want to attract in a month?
- Or, do you have an amount of sales leads you want to convert?
Once you have set a goal, you will then be able to track the progress of your campaign.
2) Focuses Content
A strategy also helps you produce better, more specific blogs. By establishing what direction you would like your blogs to take, you will be able to produce content that has a more direct appeal to your target audience.
For example, your buyer persona research could reveal that your older, educated audience is interested in long-form content.
3) Increases Productivity
If you create a strategy, you will also be better able to hold your content team accountable. With tools like content calendars, you can set up a publishing schedule to deliver blogs to your target audience on a regular basis.
4) Aids Analysis
Once you have developed and implemented a blogging strategy, you will have the ability to analyze and refine your content. You could then adjust publishing variables, like topics, schedules or content distribution to improve your future campaigns.
5) Raises ROI
Blogging is a cost-effective way to improve your return on investment. According to DemandMetric, content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. It’s also true that continuous blogging will improve your search engine optimization, which can attract more potential customers to your website.
These five big benefits illustrate that the key to real blogging success starts with strategy.
