Having a digital content marketing strategy is a prerequisite for achieving digital marketing success. It enables you to distinguish yourself from your competitors – to showcase your expertise and your unique selling proposition (USP). In the same way, crafting a solid blogging strategy is vital in driving conversions. It helps you reach the right audience and guide them through the buyer’s journey until they’re ready to convert.
Blog marketing also influences your brand reputation. Consistently providing your target audience with valuable content helps you boost credibility and gain customer trust and confidence. This is why many content marketing tips highlight the importance of publishing content regularly.
But if you want to discover how to create a successful blog, know that blog marketing isn’t simply about churning out post after post. Rather than focus on quantity, focus on relevance. Your blog content strategy should not only meet search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines but also match your audience’s search intent.
In this blog, we show you the importance of creating relevant, reader-centric content and ways to do it successfully.
Why Creating Relevant Content Is Crucial for Your Business
The first thing you will learn as a business owner involved in online marketing is that competition is tough.
Businesses around the world develop blog business plans and enlist content marketing services as part of their lead generation efforts. On top of that, around 6.5 million blog posts get published every day. In such a crowded and competitive space, you won’t get noticed if you have nothing valuable to offer.
Creating and publishing relevant content, on the other hand, helps your business rise above the noise. When you give exactly what prospective customers are looking for, you are well-positioned to draw them to your page and make them stay. And the longer they stay connected with your brand, the more likely they are to turn into paying customers.
Prioritizing relevance in your content marketing strategy also does the following for your technical SEO efforts:
• It decreases your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors leaving your site after viewing one page) and increases your pages per session.
• It tells search engines your website is a credible source of information on a particular keyword.
• It improves your chances of capturing higher rankings or featured snippets on Google SERPs.
Relevant content is effective content. Aligning every blog you publish to the needs of your customers lets you successfully address their problems, transform casual readers into qualified leads and, ultimately, turn these leads into sales.
The catch is that producing effective content always takes time, money and effort. After all, you are going beyond simply targeting random popular keywords. You’re now studying your customers’ pain points and finding ways to best resolve them.
But before we dive deeper into how to create a successful blog, it helps to first tackle an essential question: What is content marketing strategy in today’s digital age?
A digital content marketing strategy is the well-thought-out approach to planning, creating and distributing content. However, a professional content marketing agency does not simply upload an article to your blog page or share content across your socials. Its services include engaging a defined audience, encouraging profitable customer action and achieving your business goals.
This further proves that merely producing a certain number of blogs isn’t enough. The main idea behind how to create a blogging strategy that works is to develop content that matches your audience’s needs wherever they are in the customer journey.
How To Develop a Blog Content Strategy Founded on Relevance
Now that you know the role that relevance plays in your blog content strategy, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned. How to craft my content strategy for the blog page of my website is a quandary virtually every business owner has puzzled over. And that’s why we’ve gathered these content marketing tips for you.
1. Understand Yourself and Your Audience First
Putting into action your lessons on how to create a successful blog is certainly exciting. But before researching for keywords or planning blog topics, you must first understand yourself and your audience. Knowing who you are and who you’re speaking to helps you develop focused blog business plans.
• Take time to grasp your brand voice, mission and goals. These guide you and your content marketing specialist in building a strategy that effectively drives your business forward.
• Strive to discern your target audiences’ behavior and specific needs. Doing so helps you produce blogs that make your brand helpful and your product or service valuable for them.
2. Research the Most Appropriate Topics To Cover
Potential customers visit Google with a problem or question they want answered. So, if you want to become that relevant, helpful brand to this audience, base your blogging strategy on actual queries they pose. Write about topics that matter to them. Conduct blog optimization on existing articles by inserting related keywords throughout the copy.
This may sound overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it on your own. There’s a wealth of marketing tools you can utilize to find out the terms people use when looking for businesses like yours, like Ahrefs and AnswerThePublic. You could also get creative and look for audience insights on social forums like Reddit and Quora.
If you want to take the guesswork out of the process, you could always hire content marketing services or a content marketing agency with the right skills and tools.
3. Make Your Expertise Shine in Your Blogs
When asked for his insights into how to create a blogging strategy that wins, Thrive’s Director of Content, Brandon George, shared, “You need to do more than just offer readers general information about your business.” According to George, readers are not looking for just another random SEO post; you must give them the next-level content they want.
If you aren’t sure how to put that into practice, here’s an effective tip on how to create a successful blog: Involve your team’s experts and integrate their industry mastery into your content. These specialists can go beyond surface-level knowledge and provide insider tips you can use to solidify your content.
Ultimately, this helps you not only boost your blog marketing but also position your whole team as industry experts.
4. Write Eye-Catching Yet Honest Headlines
Content marketing tips often focus on doing thorough keyword research and writing solid copy. While these are indeed critical to your online success, your blog optimization checklist must also include crafting captivating headlines.
It pays to remember that your headline is the first thing customers see on search results pages. If you want them to click on the headline, read the content and perform your desired action, your title must first draw their attention. What is content marketing strategy good for, after all, without a powerful title? Without this critical element to support your article, all your blog business plans would naturally crumble.
With that said, avoid making false promises for the sake of enticing customers. Misleading them with clickbait titles only increases your bounce rate and negatively impacts your blog’s performance on search engines.
5. Develop Your Own Digital Content Marketing Strategy
There’s no harm in using a blog content strategy template; it helps you get started on the right track. However, remember that a cookie-cutter approach can only do so much for you.
If you want to discover how to develop a blog content strategy that works for your business, you need a custom plan that involves identifying blog formats, visuals, schedules and other elements that give you the best results. A content marketing specialist can help you identify the most suitable blogging techniques you can explore to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and optimize your conversion rate.
While you’re at it, make sure your blog business plans are in sync with other marketing tactics. At the end of the day, what is content marketing strategy for if it doesn’t align with your other digital strategies?
When your blogs are in harmony with your email marketing, social media and even pay-per-click (PPC) efforts, you automatically go beyond publishing random content. You’ll be well on your way to building solid channels of communication with your customers and, ultimately, generating better business opportunities.
Generate Lasting Wins With an Experienced Content Marketing Specialist
In this blog, we discussed the importance of creating relevant blog content for your business. We also shared some tips on strategy development, content creation and blog optimization. We hope that these gave you actionable ideas for implementing successful content marketing for small business owners.
To recap quickly, content marketing connects you with your customer base and sets your brand apart from the competition. However, you cannot generate lasting results by publishing random posts that do nothing to engage your audience. To rise above the noise, gain customer trust and drive more conversions, you need relevant content and experts who can do it for you.
If you’ve outgrown your blog content strategy template and want to produce next-level blogs, we’re the ones to call! Thrive is a seasoned content marketing agency helping businesses get the most ROI out of their blogging strategies since 2005. We take on content marketing for small business firms with our strategy-first approach and strive to find the right solutions for our clients.
Contact us today to learn more about how our content marketing services can help you draw your prospects’ attention and position your brand as industry experts.
