You are probably reading this blog post because you are aware of how important blogging is to the traffic that comes from organic search results for your website.
The reason you are here is that you are having trouble coming up with a topic to write about. Here are 6 Steps To Create Content Strategy
It’s virtually inconceivable to think that any new blog post could ever have the slightest possibility of surpassing those that currently exist, given the more than 2.5 billion blogs that are published annually.
There is already so much blog content available that coming up with a way to stand out is a really difficult undertaking.
Fortunately, there are methods for planning your blog material properly, and we’ve outlined every step in this article. Let’s start now.
1. Identify your target audience
Finding your target audience is the first step in developing an effective blog content strategy.
The act of blogging is simple: you simply throw some words together, publish them on your website, and presto! Your blog exists. However, blog content must highlight subjects that readers are interested in reading if it is to truly aid in increasing your site’s internet visibility.
And you must first understand who the blog is for in order to write blogs that attract interest.
How to identify your audience
Step 1: Start from the bottom
Make a list of all the services your business offers before you start the process. Determine the issues that each service is attempting to address and the business types that are most likely to experience those issues.
You can specify specific markets, regions, or companies that employ a given tool under “Target Businesses”. The better is to be more specific.
When in doubt about what to list under “Target Businesses,” work backward through the steps below: Find out what services your present customers are subscribed to by getting a list of them from your support and sales staff.
Step 2: Investigate your rivals
Your client database may not always accurately reflect your market potential. You might be prepared to expand your target market into industries you don’t currently serve, particularly if you run a developing start-up business.
To determine whether new industries or firms can profit from your services, you can perform a quick competition study.
To do this, visit the website of your rival and look up the sectors they cater to. Check their customer testimonials or Google reviews if they don’t have a section or page on the industries they service.
If the services you offer are comparable to those of your rivals, it is likely that their customers will also use your services. But before choosing to target a sector that you haven’t previously targeted, make sure to consult your operations staff.
Step 3: Create your buyer persona.
Once you have a list of your target companies, collaborate with your sales team to determine who would be the primary point of contact for each of them: What is their position name? What is their age? What problems do they have? Why are they getting in touch with your sales team?
Make a list of the most frequent inquiries from new clients.
Create a buyer persona, which is a detailed description of your ideal customer, using the information you have acquired. When determining what subjects your audience will find intriguing in the future, this persona will be helpful.
2. Recognize your audience’s journey
You may now guess what kind of content your target reader would be most interested in since you know who they are. You must first properly understand your marketing funnel, a crucial component of blog content preparation, in order to help you choose blog post ideas.
You’ll find a few different variations if you search for “marketing funnel” in images, ranging from the number of phases the funnel is divided into to the terminology used to describe each stage. In any case, a marketing funnel should outline the steps a user must take to learn
What are the stages of the marketing funnel?
Awareness stage:
People who are ignorant of their need for your services are at the Awareness stage, which is also sometimes referred to as the discovery phase. They might not even be aware that your services are offered. Therefore, at this point, it is doubtful that your target reader will hunt for your particular services.
They might Google their issues instead, or at least what they think is their issue. According to them, all they require to solve their problem is a useful article.
Consideration stage:
At this point in the funnel, your target reader is aware of the services available and how they can aid in resolving their issues.
They might be investigating if paying for these services is worthwhile at this point. They might not be specifically looking at your services just yet, but rather attempting to determine whether or not that service—whether it comes from you or a rival—will be valuable to them.
Decision stage:
Your intended reader just needs one more push to buy in at this point. They already understand the specific issue that needs to be resolved, are aware that your services will aid in solving it, and are now attempting to decide why they should pick you.
People’s interests and mental states vary depending on where they are in the marketing funnel. You can determine the individual interests of people at various phases of their journey to discovering your firm by comprehending each stage of the marketing funnel.
3. Choose the appropriate blog topics for each level of the sales funnel.
You need to pinpoint particular blog content kinds that correspond to your audience’s preferences at each stage of the marketing funnel in order to come up with the best blog ideas. The information you offer to entice them to your website should be in line with the fact that people in the awareness stage have different questions and concerns than people in the consideration and decision stages.
For instance, blog subjects like “benefits of outsourcing IT” or “how much should you pay for IT” would not interest your buyer persona if they are at the awareness stage and thinking, “I don’t need to engage an IT personnel; I’ll take care of IT myself to cut cost.”
You must provide them with what they need based on their current mental state if you want to draw them to your website. If you have excellent writing abilities, you can utilize your awareness blog entries to subtly shift people from the awareness stage to the contemplation stage and beyond.
Content for the awareness stage
People are still working to define their problems at the top of the marketing funnel. They can be searching for a fix for a minor issue rather than the main issue that needs to be resolved. They could not have recognized their need for your services, which could explain why these “superficial problems” exist.
At this point, the purpose of your content should be to inform them. Consider the following instance:
About Business
You own a managed IT services company that offers complete IT assistance to small, newly established companies.
- Managed IT services are what you provide.
- Costly IT problems are the issue your solution is attempting to address.
- Any SMB in Manhattan without an internal IT team is one of the companies with this issue.
Your buyer persona
Thrifty One of the people you target is Terry, the proprietor of a modest financial company with five employees. She values cost-cutting greatly. She takes care of IT issues that her five employees report as part of her cost-saving plan.
Her staff members have complained about sluggish computer performance, printer problems, accessing their database, and problems with Microsoft Excel, among other things.
By conducting her own Google search to uncover articles that would help resolve the concerns presented by her colleagues, Terry is trying her best to provide IT assistance to all of her staff. Her staff members occasionally have to wait while she searches for a solution because she can’t always discover a solution as quickly as she would like to.
At the awareness stage, Terry is unaware of the true issue and instead thinks hiring help will be too expensive. This implies that she won’t find your managed IT services sales-oriented content all that engaging.
If Terry is still in the awareness stage, none of your blog posts about the advantages of a managed IT services provider in the expansion of a firm will pique his interest. She doesn’t see any value in visiting your website, thus you’ll never be able to advance her in the marketing funnel.
However, you might stand a chance if you create content that aids in resolving Terry’s apparent issues. The following articles will be of interest to Terry because you are aware that her perceived issues surround anything IT-related:
- Your PC is so sluggish; why?
- 8 frequent printer problems and solutions
- Top 5 programs to keep your
- 10 suggestions for increasing Microsoft Excel
You won’t be attempting to sell anything to Thrifty Terry in the aforementioned articles. With the help of these articles, you may increase the authority of your website and position yourself as a reliable supplier of helpful materials.
You should include brief passages that assist Thrifty Terry in leaving her current frame of mind in your awareness blog postings so she can descend deeper down the funnel.
The consideration & decision stages
People are already aware of their actual issue and may have a concept of the services they require throughout the consideration stage. They might not be thinking about your exact services right now; instead, they might be debating between different service options. Continuing with our prior illustration:
Thrifty Terry has come to the realization that she may in fact require assistance in handling the IT for her company. She is still struggling with money, so she is attempting to compare the costs of employing an internal IT team vs a managed IT services company.
How to generate blog post ideas
Make a list of any queries or issues that your target audience may have at each step of the funnel.
Don’t forget to take into account the methods they employ and the queries they frequently pose.
List topic clusters linked to Microsoft Excel, such as “MS Excel how-tos” or “advice on being effective in Excel,” for instance, if your buyer persona uses that program.
4. Target the right keywords
A good blog content strategy requires more than just understanding who to write for and what blog posts they might be interested in.
In fact, blog content strategists and writers are all too acquainted with the situation in which they publish a blog post that they believed would be particularly fantastic and intriguing to their target audience, only to subsequently watch it perform poorly.
This happens frequently because writers frequently undervalue the value of keyword research or just don’t realize that keywords are the foundation for generating organic traffic.
How to conduct keyword research
Step 1: Use Search Engines
Look up each of the themes on your list of blog posts on Google. To determine if this is what you believe your target audience would find beneficial.
Step 2: Use a keyword research tool
You may determine what keywords a particular site is ranking for using keyword research tools like Ahrefs, allowing you to choose the keywords that your blog should target.
Step 1’s top result’s link should be copied and pasted into Ahrefs’ link explorer. When you click the search icon, make sure the search parameter is set to “Exact URL.”
You can select the Keyword Difficulty filter on the organic keywords page (KD). The KD score indicates how challenging it would be to rank for a particular keyword; the greater the score, the harder it is. When possible, aim for a
5. Create a transparent editorial procedure.
Regular blogging may get messy, even with the help of a solid content strategy, especially if a set procedure isn’t established that everyone can follow.
Making an editing process that supports ensuring that all contributors are effective and accountable to the responsibilities assigned to them will help you avoid losing sight of your content strategy.
Make an editorial calendar first. You must be explicit in your editing calendar regarding who is responsible for what tasks and when they are due.
Keep track of previous publications using the editorial calendar so you can see which blogs need to be updated or linked to in upcoming blog entries.
6. You should aim to be helpful when you write.
In the previous sections, we’ve identified your target audience, studied their journey through your marketing funnel, identified what topics they are interested in, and what keywords to target with your blog.
You’ve created a buyer persona for a reason: to identify the people who need your services the most. You also went through the rest of the previous steps to find out what blog content your buyer persona will appreciate at different stages of their journey.
Conclusion
To stand out in the sea of blog content is not impossible. We’ve laid out everything you need to get started; all you need is a well-thought-out content strategy. You’ll be well on your way to knowing not only what to write about, but also how to get your blogs to rank and stand out from the competition, by paying attention to the six elements on the above checklist.
