Blog Strategy for Sustainable Content Marketing Success

The foundation of today’s marketing campaign for brands is content marketing. The kinds of content that can effectively reach the target audience online include emails, case studies, infographics, white papers, articles, and blog posts. 

Blogs account for a large portion of content used on digital marketing today because they are relatively affordable. Using content for sustainable content marketing success is viable as long as you use the right approach. This article highlights processes and steps that can guarantee marketing success. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Blog marketing is built on SEO and so to attract the audience, you need to create informative and SEO-optimized blogs. One of the ways to achieve this is by having killer blog intros that can prompt the audience to read and minimize bounce rates. SEO is a way of boosting the volume and quality of your web traffic. 

An effective process and area to boost SEO include the keyword usage of the blog content. Keyword usage offers a system of allowing blog content writers to include particular relevant words in the blog posts. Since the keywords are relevant to the blog topics, it will be easier for the readers to find the posts by simply conducting an internet search.

SEO is sustainable because it is an effective kind of digital marketing that increases traffic and promotes brand awareness. The ability of SEO to yield tangible results is what makes it an ideal digital marketing strategy. There is also an increased demand for SEO as many brands are appreciating its value.

One of the brands that have successfully used SEO is Etsy. Etsy has focused on creating a strong content strategy to drive organic traffic to its site. The company’s marketplace for dealing with hand-made goods is known for its content and it lures people to keep on coming back. 

Set clear goals

Goal setting is an important aspect of any project. It is important to define your direction and track progress as you move towards goal achievement. Have a specific and measurable target when designing and implementing a blog content strategy.

Avoid value goals such as wanting to make sales but instead specify how much your sales target is. Having specific content marketing goals can allow you to plan well and increase the chances of success.

Your content marketing goals could be to boost brand awareness and web traffic, grow your email list, get more followers on social media, or boost conversion rates. 

Your value as a marketer is gauged on results and not productivity or activities. For your content marketing initiatives to be meaningful, they should be in line with the measurable business objectives. 

Aligning content marketing goals with business goals entails talking to relevant executives to clarify the goals. When you know what your business is set to achieve, it will be easier to plan for content that can facilitate the achievement of those goals. 

Wistia, a professional video hosting provider, has been successful in creating marketing content. 

The company embarked on a campaign aimed at driving quality leads to its site. They used a TV series referred to as the Brandwagon with humorous content to provide insights into the brand growth. 

Know the target audience

The purpose of content marketing is to gather leads and make them long-term buyers. To achieve this, you need to understand the buyer persona well. Developing and identifying a buyer persona offers the benefits of lead identification, exceptional brand experience, good customer segmentation, and cross-marketing alignment.

Creating a buyer persona entails getting data from the existing customers and gathering the persona data based on research. It also requires aligning the buyer’s personal data with the appropriate marketing approaches. Knowing your target audience is a big step to creating a blog strategy that can lead to continuous lead generation and conversion.

Initially, MySpace directed its marketing efforts to every person who desired to be connected on Facebook. After Facebook offered a useful and robust tool for reaching the target audience, MySpace created a better strategy by starting with the target buyer persona and started focusing on the most ideal persona; the musicians. MySpace got a reprieve after the musicians started posting songs on MySpace. 

Publish premium posts only

A well-planned blogging strategy may not guarantee content marketing success. You need to regularly create and publish quality articles. Readers are interested in educational, stylish, and informative articles all the time. Extremely short blogs may not impress an online audience and so you need to publish comprehensive content with well-analyzed topics.

Try to enrich the blog posts with alternative formats like animations, images, GIFs, and more. This is a good approach because people are more attracted to content backed by visual elements. Visuals enable the audiences to enjoy modern content experiences because the blogs are well-structured to boost readability. 

Deciding on an appropriate way to deliver valuable content to your target audience should be a top priority. Brainstorm the various ways to add value to the readers and don’t be discouraged if you are not professionally trained in a given niche. The kind of content that is likely to be more attractive to the audience depends on the unique characteristics of that audience. 

Instead of identifying the audience by general demographics such as income, gender and age, you could focus on how knowledgeable the audience is in a topic. HubSpot has strongly leveraged the quality of content for its blogs.

The company has built an excellent customer journey to help convert prospects into buyers as soon as they are ready. HubSpot uses a variety of funnels to create blog articles for broad and attractive topics. After every post, they have CTA to test their free software and this attracts readers to collect emails with popups. 

Promote your content

Famous and influential blogs regularly promote their content to maintain some level of popularity. Explore various ways of promoting your content online, such as sending new content digests and posts to subscribers’ emails. 

Since social media boasts millions of daily users, it is one of the most effective tools for content promotion. Add icons for social sharing to your posts to encourage the readers to share the posts on their accounts.

Another promotion tactic is to create guest posts for other websites. By doing so, you will attract a new audience and encourage people to follow your blog. Q/A websites can also be great blog promotion platforms to boost online authority and place you as an industry leader. Promoting content is important in the following ways:

• It is a way of attracting new clients and increasing web traffic
• Promoting a blog can build your brand reputation in a particular niche
• It can help you to advertise more effectively in a modern business environment
• It boosts your trustworthiness in the eyes of clients
• Promoting a blog can help to maintain a marketing strategy and create well-structured content.

Boohoo Group has managed to thrive amid the coronavirus pandemic. One of the factors that have led to the company’s success is the social media strategy. Boohoo Group has been promoting its content on social media using the influencer marketing strategy. The influencer endorsements have helped the brand to reach out to the young audience on Instagram, where it has many followers. 

Conclusion     

Developing a blog strategy for sustainable marketing success should be a priority for every digital marketer. Blog content can yield positive results for your brand if you follow the above processes and guidelines. You need to be persistent and patient to see the results of your content marketing efforts, including conversions.  

About the author:

Tiffany Harper is a training guru who’s been working in the corporate sector as the technology expert for several years now. She is a management graduate and loves to share her experience through blogs and expert articles. For her love of writing, she provided online consultations for the dissertation writing service department, while working with EssayMama. Please do not hesitate to contact her on LinkedIn.