Blogging is a great way to attract new leads and convert them into customers. In order to create a successful blogging strategy, you need to have a blog content strategy plan in place that outlines the goals of your blogging efforts, the audience you are trying to reach, and the type of content you will produce. In this step-by-step guide, we will walk you through the process of creating a successful blog strategy for your business!
In order to create a successful blog strategy, you first need to understand the importance of blogging as a content marketing tool. Blogging can help you attract new leads and convert them into customers, making it an essential part of your Inbound Marketing efforts.
By producing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, you can engage with your prospects and convert them into customers.
The first step in creating a successful blog strategy is to create a blogging plan. This plan should outline the goals of your blogging efforts, the audience you are trying to reach, and the type of content you will produce. It's important to be clear about what you want to achieve with your blogging efforts so that you can create content that is aligned with your goals. Once you have a plan in place, you can start creating high-quality content that will engage and convert your target audience.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your blogging plan:
Not all content is created equal. In order to engage your readers and encourage them to convert, you need to create content that is interesting, informative, and well-written. Here are a few tips to help you produce engaging blog content:
By following these tips, you can produce engaging blog content that will resonate with your target audience.
One of the most common blogging questions is "how often should I blog?" The answer to this question depends on a variety of factors, including your audience, your goals, and your resources. As a general rule, however, it's best to blog at least once a week in order to keep readers engaged and ensure that they continue coming back for more. But I can say that our customers who had us blog for twice a day, that once they reached around 1,000 blogs on their site, were getting well north of one million unique page views a month.
If you're just starting out, it may be wise to begin with a lower frequency and work your way up as you become more comfortable blogging. You don't want to overwhelm yourself or your readers by publishing too much content at once.
When you first start blogging, it can be difficult to come up with ideas for new blog posts. If you haven't already, you will want to install both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Search Console has the ability for you to search on the actual query's people are submitting to Google Search when Google decides to surface one of your pages.
You then should focus on the following types of questions:
Which, if you have any journalism training at all, you should recognize as the key types of questions that news articles attempt to answer.
Blog posts come in many forms, but if you want your blogging efforts to result in leads and sales, you should ensure your blogs are useful to your reader. When someone reads one of your blogs, they should come away knowing something they didn't know before. You may hear this as educational or transformational focused writing. It's usually a bit of both.
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Within the context of Inbound Marketing, which relies on content, which is typically designed as a series of content offers that 'pull' someone through your funnel, there is an 'iron' triangle you should keep in mind:
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Now that you know about the 'Iron Triangle' of content marketing, it is time that you understand the three different stages of a typical marketing funnel:
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Roughly speaking TOFU content is going to be focused on 'What' and 'Who' type questions. MOFU content is going to be focused on 'When' and "Why' questions. BOFU is going to be focused on 'how' and 'Why Us' type questions.
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Here's the challenge - your customers can and do enter your funnel at any stage and transit it both up and down. They do this so much that today, their journey looks more like a flywheel than a funnel, but it is very difficult to measure a flywheel with very advanced analytics tools, such as you might find with funnelytics.
You can write blogs with many goals in mind. For instance, many blogs are written strictly to generate traffic, with little regard to getting a ready to convert. These are typically sites that driving affiliate advertising or have other types of revenue streams as a goal. But if you want to generate a lead, you should write a blog that has one goal in mind, and one goal only - get them to click the CTA. Even better, get them to fill out your lead generation form right within the blog itself, thus entering your funnel then and there.
There are many types of blogs, from heavily visual oriented to highly detailed ones. When it comes to business blogging, with an eye toward lead generation, if you stick to two types of blogs:
You will generally achieve the desired results of getting your reader to click on the CTA and proceed onto the landing page.
By following these steps, you can create a successful blogging strategy that will help you achieve your business goals. blogging is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy, so make sure you take the time to create a plan and produce high-quality content that will engage your target audience.
I am often asked how often should a business blog. My answer is the typical consultant's answer - it depends!
We have had clients who blog two times a day, seven days a week and we have had others who blogged perhaps once a month. We, ourselves, have published hundreds of blogs and continue to publish one or so a week. What results have we seen?
Let's take the first client who had a blogging team publishing two blogs a day, seven days a week - in both English and Spanish. At 1,000 blogs published, their site was receiving around 1.5 million unique visitors a month, and converting every seventh visitor into a paying customer.
For our other clients who have chosen to blog less often, preferring instead to concentrate on 'quality' content, their results have been as expected, less than spectacular. By blogging less often, even though the content was very high quality, the number of blogs published was way lower than the first case study mentioned. Their traffic never exceeded 2,000 visitors a month and their revenue achievement was far less.
Though there are millions of blogs being published daily, it remains a vital source of traffic. Our experience, based on the data we have access to, says that you need to publish high quality blog content often, and that the higher the number of blogs you have published, provided they follow all SEO best practices and provide value, the better your results will be in terms of organic traffic and lead generation and revenue achievement.
There is no hard and fast rule here, other than, very often. What we have seen is that Google seems to rewards frequency. For instance, when we first started blogging, we took the low volume, high quality route. We didn't see much traffic from that effort.
As an experiment, we then switched to a concept we called a blogging sprint. We published one blog every day for a month. We could not do this all at once, as we also needed to have the downloadable content and the latest tools we had designed ready. We also wanted to incorporate video marketing into our business blogging efforts.
We built our landing pages based on our content strategy and keyword research as well as using artificial intelligence and machine learning and deep knowledge of our customer journey. We then created relevant content in the form of blogs that provided insightful content that was considered valuable content that covered industry trends, provided thought leadership and covered topics related to what to what we do, which is primarily the development and delivery of business intelligence and lead generation systems to large companies and other SAP partner companies and SAP customers.
Digital marketers continuously implement landing page optimization tweaks. The process should be a continuous process driven by search engine feedback provided by Google and other search engines such as bing. In our case, our blogging sprint, designed to not just increase traffic, but as well, to drive increased lead generation, drove a dramatic increase in business.
The best marketing blogs also leverage social media as one of channels. Our digital marketing tools allow us to publish directly to our key social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.
They also allow us to tailor the message for each channel according to the requirements of each channel. As a data driven digital marketing company, we rely heavily on marketing automation. However, we don't let marketing automation run wild.
Though every type of business can use social media to boost sales, not every social media channel is appropriate for every type of business. You should also keep in mind that the audience for a social media channel may vary greatly by country. For instance, LinkedIn is more popular in the United States than in Japan, as far as a job board. Facebook tends to do better in Japan for job searchers than LinkedIn.
Blogging can be very time consuming. But once it is written, many popular blogs then employ both Google Adwords and LinkedIn ads to 'boost' the traffic to the blogs. If you're looking to increase revenue, then paying for traffic can make sense.
The benefits of advertising your marketing blog boil down to:
It is important to have goals, set some targets and track results so that you can determine whether or not your blogging strategy is effective. If it's not, then make changes. But if it is working, keep doing what you're doing! You'll see an improvement in lead generation and revenue achievement over time.
As digital marketers, we are always looking for ways to improve our business results - this includes improving website traffic, generating more leads and achieving higher levels of revenue. A key part of any successful digital marketing strategy is blogging; but simply blogging for the sake of blogging isn't going to get you over the finish line.
If you follow all of the advice in this blog and you should, and you get a massive increase in traffic and conversions, congratulations. You're off to a good start to digital marketing success using content marketing. But that won't put you in first place in today's hyper-competitive digital marketing landscape. Master digital marketers go much further, and focus on conversion rate optimization.
Conversion Rate Option or just CRO, focuses on improving every element of the customer experience, starting from they first run across your business, typically after doing a search on a search engine, all the way through to buying and taking care of your product.
Perry Marshall, of 80/20 fame, is one of my favorite marketers. It not just that he is a pilot (like me) or very smart (way smarter than me), it's one key point he made - improve your offer. Always and forever, spend time on improving your offer, it will make everything else you, as a digital marketer do, work better.
If you focus on CRO, you'll get more mileage from every blog you publish and every digital marketing tip you implement.
Marketing automation platforms, like Hubspot, allow you to send out lead nurturing emails to customer segments of one. Email best practices are many, but one constant piece of digital marketing advice is to make sure your emails are valuable. One of the best ways to leverage this channel is to send out emails that provide summaries of relevant blog posts you have published in the past, as well as links to read the full blogs. This is one of the key tactics you should keep in mind when setting up your lead nurturing sequences.
If you run online business, such as an ecommerce store, having and using an email marketing platform, like Hubspot or Klaviyo, which is fully integrated with your store and your digital marketing automation platform, is key to improving conversion rates.
Your business' blog should be one of the best marketing blogs out there. Using tags, you can use your email marketing platform to send out curated lists of your best, most relevant blogs, to prospective customers 'in the moment'.
The marketing industry is very advanced. One of my favorite revenue boosting tactics for our ecommerce clients is to send out special offers, usually in the form of coupons, when they have interacted with one of our blogs, especially if they have something in their shopping cart. Amazon does this all day long. But the smallest player can do exactly the same. They just need enough blog content and creativity to come up with the offers.
Imagine this scenario: You need to change the battery in your Car's Remote Control. You've never even looked for the battery before, let alone decided to change it yourself. Where do you go first? Most people probably go to Youtube and search for Car Model + Remote Control Battery. In my case, that means I search for Lexus LS 460 Remote Control Battery. I will get back pages of results. But I just want to find the battery part number. Not watch an hour on the subject.
Now imagine I put the same question into Google, and I get one of the little featured snippets that tell me exactly what I want to know, and provides me a link to the location of the blog where that featured snippet was posted.
There's a lot of different ways this scenario can play out. Perhaps I will order from that company's website. Perhaps I will click an affiliate link on that site that takes me to Amazon, where I buy it. This happens all the time.
Many of our Inbound Marketing and Sales clients are focused on selling complex services, primarily with the SAP space. SAP is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system used by hundreds of thousands of businesses, of all sizes and across wide variety of industries.
The blogs they write are often about how to use one or more the SAP solutions to achieve very complex business outcomes. Sometimes, there is reticence about explaining how to do certain things, as it seems to be giving away intellectual property of the client. Though that is a possibility, here's what actually happens,
As I mentioned earlier, Hubspot's marketing automation platform allows you simultaneously publish your blog on your own site and on your social media channels, including LinkedIn. It has happened on numerous occasions where customers or prospective customers (prospects) have made reference to a post we had a client do on LinkedIn or even had it on screen and asked us to go through it with them.
Most of our client's prospects are very busy. They are experts at what they do, and are happy when they find someone with expertise they need to accomplish a goal. Like almost everyone in the business world, they usually have a LinkedIn profile which is constantly feeding them information - tailored to their interest, which they have expressed both implicitly and explicitly.
If you've published an in-depth piece of content, that explains how to do something, perhaps, for example, how to improve your strategy or upgrade your data warehouse, and they've read it, more often than not, they want you to do it, so they don't have to. After all, they're already very busy, and probably don't have the bandwidth to fix whatever issue they have or to pursue whatever opportunity they've run across.
One of the most powerful 'offer improvement' strategies you should pursue is productizing your offer. Many would argue that when you productize your service, you limit your revenue potential. That's the glass half-full view of life and is completely wrong.
Here's how it actually works. Let's say you have a complex service offering within the SAP space. The problem is, only part of the offering can be productized while the remaining part of the offering has to be on a Time & Materials basis, meaning the price varies for that second part.
Step One: Stop with the 'it depends' and write down what you actually have to do every time. For instance, most of my SAP partner customers have to conduct 'scoping' exercises. These never vary by much. In fact, with a little thought, and examination of past project documentation, you will generally find the same set of questions and answers being asked and received, with only minimal variation in the outcome. This is the part you turn into a 'productized' service offering, the scoping session.
Step Two: Now that you have delivered your pre-packaged, 'productized' service offering, you can put together your fully scoped project offering. But since you also had time to interact with the client's project team, you also had time to develop a level of trust between you, your team and their team.
Step Three: Most of the time, it is entirely possible and highly desirable to present 2 or more (ideally 3) possible offers in your now fully scoped project offer. It is also a good time to offer the maximum plan but resequenced over longer periods of time to meet client budgetary constraints.
I do all this with my favorite project management tool, MS Project. But you can do the same thing with any of the other tools out there, such as Monday.com (there are a lot of them). Planning out the initial productized offering can be done very quickly and very precisely using the MS Project Management tool. Just keep in mind - you want to plan out a Deliverables Oriented, Work Breakdown Structure, time bound, fully resourced project plan, including your team, your required resources and client required team members and resources. MSProject will then spit out a fully costed project plan. Total time to develop? Less than half a day if you have the questions and expected deliverables defined. It doesn't get much simpler than this.
Now that you have your Productized Service offer ready, packaged and ready to go to market, time to start blogging.
Your blogging should be focused on each stage of your marketing funnel. You remember those:
Though you will need to blog for each stage of the funnel about your entire offering, this strategy, the one we've seen work over and over, requires that your BOFU blogging is focused on selling the productized service offering first. It's the one that is easiest to explain, has a price and can be used for commercial leverage.
Because you're probably not well known, if known at all by your potential customer, I recommend that at least some of your effort in the TOFU stage is oriented toward developing confidence and trust in your brand.
Once a client has 'trust' in you and your brand and thinks you might be able to solve their problem, then your offers can transition more into the details of your offering. It is not yet time to seal the deal - unless they give you the signal to stop selling and sign the deal.
When you first start your content marketing offering development offer, you will probably just set up one funnel. However, as time progresses, and you get more customer feedback, primarily by active listening, you will see a need to develop multiple routes to your BOFU offer.
You need a powerful marketing automation platform to handle a multi-channel marketing approach to sales. It must provide the ability to route different email to different contacts based on behavior and predictive lead scoring. It also must provide one central contact management database, tightly integrated with your sales and marketing teams.
We've talked a lot about what it takes to use a blog as an effective marketing tool. We've explored how it must be tightly integrated into your overall marketing content approach, and your offer. If you would like to get started with your business blog, you might like to check out our Introductory Guide to Business Blogging. Just click the button to get your copy.
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As the world's greatest blog strategist, I turn to Sun Tsu's quote: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." When it comes to blogging, opportunities are plentiful, especially when it comes to valuable comments. Comments not only provide feedback and engagement from readers but also offer insight into what topics are resonating with them. In fact, in this blog, we see how prospects bring up blogs in meetings, demonstrating the value of creating in-depth content that establishes thought leadership and builds trust. As a blogger, it's crucial to ask readers if they found certain points interesting or if they learned something new and valuable. This not only encourages engagement but also helps tailor future content to their interests. So, what else do you want to read about relevant to the topic of using blogs as an effective marketing tool? Let us know in the comments below.