How to develop your blog strategy

Building brand awareness is important in the world of marketing. And as a business, you should be exploring all types of digital marketing, including blogs.

Blogs are a great way to generate organic traffic toward your website, which we all know, is helpful when it comes to ranking highly on Google’s search engine.

Despite blogs existing for a long time now, they still remain useful for businesses online and are a necessary part of your digital marketing strategy.

The benefits of blogs are undeniable:

  • Drive potential customers to your website
  • Increase enquiries, leads and sales
  • Build brand awareness
  • Demonstrate industry authority
  • Act as launch pads for further engagement

HubSpot found that companies with blogs have 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.

However, you can’t just push out random blog content and hope for the best.

If you approach blogging without a well-thought-out content plan, then you might as well be shouting into the abyss. With that being said, this guide will share with you what it takes to create a successful blog content strategy in 2024.

What is a blog content strategy?

A blog content strategy is a type of digital marketing strategy. The intention is to fulfil a certain goal or goals for the business. With a blog content strategy, it’s a vision and plan that you have for your blog specifically.

Ultimately, a blog strategy is focused around your overall business goals. Your broad goal may be to grow your business, and growing it online is key. This is where content marketing can help in the form of blog writing.

The goals of a blog strategy usually revolve around:

  • Getting more traffic (people) to discover and land on your website (part of SEO)
  • Increase leads, enquiries and sales from your website
  • Become the leading voice in your industry – become the go to for your customers

Why do you need a blog content strategy?

What is the importance of a blog content strategy? There are many reasons why you should be implementing a blog content strategy for the benefit of your business in general and in terms of your marketing efforts.

It helps set and reach business goals

All of your marketing efforts should be getting you closer to those all-important business goals, and it’s no different for blog marketing.

You might want to create content for an audience that hits your target audience. Or perhaps a new business goal is to expand to a global level.

A blog content strategy is useful to implement to help reach those new and existing goals as a company.

Blog writing should be a key ingredient within your SEO and content marketing, and is one of the most effective approaches to growing your business.

Produces content that converts leads

With the right blog content strategy, your marketing team will produce the right type of content that converts prospects landing on your website right down to becoming a hot lead!

Knowing exactly who you’re writing for, the tone of the content and how valuable said content is, all help contribute positively to lead conversions.

As a business, there’s nothing better than creating organic content that pushes your audience further down the buyer funnel.

Unsure who you should be writing to? Every marketer should have a buyer persona. Create your own customer persona here.

Get a customer persona template

Identifies new opportunities for the business

A blog content strategy is helpful in locating and identifying new opportunities for the business.

Content marketers should constantly be looking for new opportunities in content creation. Looking at what’s trending or what’s being done successfully by other businesses is what will help contribute positively to your own content strategy.

A good blog content strategy should be able to put into action, all of the content strategy goals that intend to seek out new opportunities for the business. Whether that’s acquiring more clients, working with other businesses or making more money in general.

Optimises your marketing team and budget

Without a plan or context when it comes to your marketing strategy, a company’s marketing team might not know what type of blog content to create, when it needs to be posted, etc.

With a blog content strategy, strategy can help refine and detail all of the requirements needed for your blog so that you can optimise your efforts and budget available.

Your blog content strategy therefore becomes a call-to-action (CTA) for your marketing team. It defines your performance metrics, sets a content schedule and communicates all of the objectives required to make your blog content a success.

5 tips on creating your blog content strategy

In order to deliver blog content that ticks off all the benefits above, it’s important to spend time developing your blog content strategy correctly.

This section will outline all of the tips you’ll need to create a high-performing, valuable blog content strategy in 2024.

1. Set clear goals

When developing a blog content strategy for the first time, you want to ensure you set clear goals so that there’s no confusion. You might have any number of copywriters working on your blog content, or you might prefer to outsource your blog content. Therefore, you want to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Setting specific goals helps clear up any confusion or questioning. You also want to create goals that are both achievable and measurable. If you’re setting goals that are unattainable whether that’s down to time, employee skillset or resources, then chances are, your goals are going to fail.

That’s not great for motivating your marketers who want nothing more than to tick off goals successfully. At the same time, you also want to be able to measure the goals you’re setting so that you can assess how well it’s doing – or where it might be going wrong.

Clear goals help to maximise your marketing budget and boost the morale of a team that wants to see the company succeed.

2. Know your audience

A successful blog content strategy is one that knows its audience in meticulous detail. When it comes to creating blog content that’s engaged fully, it’s crucial to know your audience.

At the very least, knowing who your audience is in terms of their demographics is helpful to find out what background they have and what that might mean in terms of the content you produce.

Many leads or customers will experience pain points which prevent them from moving further down the buyer funnel and making a purchase. Understanding what these pain points are, will certainly help develop a help blog content strategy that resolves them.

3. Explore content themes and topics

When developing a blog content strategy, it’s often a case of trialling out what type of content works and what doesn’t.

It’s useful to try out relevant content themes and topics, monitoring their performance to see if they do well when published to your audience. These themes and topics should still align with both your business goals and audience interests.

There are plenty of blog post ideas for business worth brainstorming that are available online for your creative theft.

4. Make use of keyword research and SEO

Conducting keyword research is an essential part of SEO (search engine optimisation). SEO is a method of improving your website’s rankings on the major search engines, like Google and Bing.

The higher up your website and its pages show on the search engine results pages, the more traffic they’re likely to get, so it’s a useful practice to implement into your content strategy.

And when we say your website pages, we mean blogs. That’s right, your blog posts can rank on search engines! This is why blogs must be a key ingredient in your SEO strategy.

Keywords play a vital role in the optimisation of your site because they direct the right audience to your site.

When users are searching for relevant topics or questions online, your blogs should be optimised with well-researched keywords to help garner attention. It should be bringing lots of organic traffic to the website.

5. Create an editorial calendar

In order to carry out a successful blog content strategy, consistency is key. Editorial calendars are a great way to ensure your marketing and content team publishes content regularly and is organised in their approach to what gets rolled out.

Some of the content might align with certain holidays over the year or events that take place and therefore need to be timed effectively.

Measuring blog content strategy success

Your blog content’s success relies on how efficient you are when it comes to measuring that success. Outlining any KPIs (key performance indicators) within your blog content strategy is essential as it gives your marketing and content teams, some direction on what to look for.

From levels of traffic to engagement on posts and conversion rates are all KPIs worth implementing. Here are some other key metrics worth monitoring when it comes to measuring your blog content strategy success.

There are plenty of tools and analytics platforms which are well worth the investment to help measure how well your blog content is doing online.

Here are some helpful tools that are worth exploring and investing in:

  • Google Analytics (G4) (free to use!)
  • Hubspot Marketing Hub
  • SEMrush
  • Google Search Console (free to use!)
  • MarketMuse

Every platform offers something a little different. Some offer free memberships, while others might be a monthly cost. If it’s possible, do a trial of the platform or tool first to see if it’s the right fit for you and your business.

Adapting and evolving

Your blog content strategy might look vastly different in five years time than it does right now. It’s important to remember that the world of content, particularly online content, is forever growing and changing.

You certainly want to adapt the strategy you’ve created, over time. As you monitor the performance of your content and notice changes in market trends, your content strategy should also be updated to cater to these changes. By keeping your content fresh and relevant, helps ensure your audience also remains engaged!

Creating a blog content strategy in 2024 is certainly beneficial for any business, especially in the digital age that’s thriving. Be sure to use these tips to help develop an impressive strategy for your business’s blog content this year.

I can help you with your blog strategy now and for the future. Drop me an email and let’s get to work!

Looking to write your own blogs but not sure where to start?

This template will be super useful to you starting your blog writing journey! Check it out here.

Blog writing cheat sheet

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