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There are currently over 600 million blogs in the world today.
Isn’t that crazy?
To put that insane number into perspective, that indicates that there are nearly two blogs for every American. It also means that there’s a hell of a lot of competition out there.
Businesses consistently choose to adopt an organic inbound marketing strategy. They’ve been observing the transition from pushy, invasive outbound marketing methods to customer-centric inbound ones.
It’s not like this is a bad plan, either. The benefits of using inbound marketing channels are numerous and well-documented. Even industrial companies, which have been known for using outdated marketing channels, have been incorporating more inbound marketing strategies.
So they start a blog. No plan, no research, nothing. They simply publish pointless posts expecting a sea of engagement to come crashing in.
This is because publishing valueless content and expecting to see positive results is a recipe for disaster. Blogging for business requires extensive planning, research, and even patience.
The benefits of blogging can be enormous when done right. In fact, businesses with blogs produce up to 67% more leads per month than businesses without. That ought to be sufficient to persuade nearly everyone that a thoughtful blog marketing strategy is required going forward. The question is, in the future, which blog marketing strategies should you employ? Fortunately, rather than abandoning you, we are presenting some of our favorite blog marketing strategies and pointers to help you reap the benefits of blog marketing. 1. Learn about your audience’s problems. At the end of the day, blog marketing is all about understanding your buyer personas and the problems they have.
Pro Tip: If you want to position yourself as an authority in your industry, your blog should help to solve these problems.
The issue at hand is how exactly to identify the issues that your target audience is experiencing. Well, there are a few different ways to gather this information effectively:
Ask Them Directly
What better way to take all the guesswork out than by asking your audience exactly what problems they’re looking to have solved?
By doing this, you completely remove the chance of creating useless content that won’t speak to anyone.
Here are a few ways to directly ask your audience about their pain points:
One-on-one conversations
by way of email Chats live Over the phone
Not only are you developing a deeper connection with your prospective clients, but you are also acquiring the data you require to produce content that is beneficial to your buyer personas. Two for one deal.
Research Competitor Blogs
What are your competitors blogging about?
Chances are they’re answering a lot of the questions that your potential customers have. If you do a little research, you should be able to come up with topics that also help to address pain points, since you’ve likely got similar buyer personas.
Blogging is not an exception when it comes to the many different facets of marketing where competitor research is a viable strategy. Make use of it to your advantage to assist you in producing useful content for your clients. Comments and Forums Checking public forums in your industry can be a great way to gather ideas for content that addresses customer pain points.
Simply search for forums in your industry on Google and sift through them for forum posts regarding potential problems.
For example, if you’re in the SaaS industry, you can Google “SaaS forums” and several entries will pop up for you to look into:
You can also start your own thread to start the conversation if you can’t find any posts about potential pain points. Again using the SaaS example, you could start a thread titled “What are the biggest challenges you’re facing in the SaaS industry?” You should be able to use this to learn exactly what your clients are going through. 2. Pay Close Attention to the Buyer’s Journey
The best examples of content marketing prowess out there, whether B2B or B2C, all have one very important thing in common: They create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey.
Blog marketing is no different, being that it’s a significant part of content marketing itself.
So what are the stages of the buyer’s journey?
Blog posts are often thought of as only useful for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. However, they’re actually effective for all three stages. It’s simply a matter of the content within the blog posts.
The Awareness Phase The awareness stage is all about being informative without pushing your company onto customers who simply aren’t ready to make a decision just yet.
An effective awareness stage blog post should:
Be informative and present your company as an authority and expert in your industry
Help solve potential problems your target audience is facing
Never be overly salesy or pushy
Going back to the first blog marketing strategy and comprehending the issues your audience is facing are necessary steps in developing awareness stage topics. Once you do that, you can start creating some effective awareness stage content to help move your customers along the buyer’s journey.
Stage of Consideration Blogs in the consideration phase may begin to include your business in greater detail. You still don’t want to be too pushy about it, but you definitely want to get yourself into the conversation.
An effective way to use blogs for the consideration stage is to publish different solutions to a problem your audience commonly faces. In this type of post, you’ll want to include your own solution and how it stacks up to the competition. This way, you’re not only throwing your name in the ring and making sure your customers know how valuable your solution is, but you’re also providing valuable content and information. The Purchase Phase During the purchase phase, blogs are all about you and your solution’s greatness. You will want to emphasize precisely in these posts how your business solves specific problems that your audience faces. Since purchase stage customers are ready to buy into a solution, these posts are meant to show them that you’re the best one for the job.
3. Proper Keyword Research For Your Topics
Keyword research is an essential component of any successful blog marketing strategy. This is how you find out how your customers search for your product or service in different ways. Additionally, it ensures that you are using search-relevant keywords. Writing posts without keywords that are being searched for consistently means that you aren’t likely to have your posts read by anyone. And if that’s the case, then why are you blogging in the first place?
However, on the other hand, you’ll also want to pay attention to how competitive a keyword is. Relatively new companies are going to have a tough time ranking a keyword that already has a ton of competition. These companies could instead target slightly less competitive keywords in order to rank effectively. It’s all about striking a balance between the two.
If you’re looking to perform in-depth keyword research, Moz has a great tool for you to use.
Josep
