In a recent survey by SEMRUSH, 78% of marketers who believe their content marketing was successful in 2021 had a well-documented content marketing strategy. Who knew, that doing your research and planning in advance pays off?
Content marketing comes in a range of different formats including blogs, videos, podcasts, social media and website cheat sheets or PDFs. This week, we wanted to give you the rundown on how to nail the perfect content marketing strategy for your blog, but the same principles can also be applied to any type of content marketing.
Know your target audience
The first step is to clearly define your target audience or buyer persona. Find out everything there is to know about your perfect potential customer. If you run an established business, you’ll already know who your target audience is. If you are just starting you may need to carry out market research, send out surveys and research industry trends to find out a bit more. It may also be beneficial to take a look at who your competitors are targeting.
You will need to figure out the type of content your target customers enjoy, what their main pain points are, how you can address these and what your unique selling point is. You may be targeting multiple buyer personas, in which case you need to produce different types of content that are tailored to each of their interests.
Conduct keyword research
As much as we always aim to produce blogs that are engaging and that actually teach our readers something new, there is another important reason for regularly posting blog articles: SEO (as per usual!).
We recommend carrying out in-depth keyword research in order to find relevant short and long-tail keywords that your target audience are searching for and that you would like your website to rank highly for on Google. Once you have your keyword list, you can then create topic clusters and use these to help you plan your upcoming blog posts.
Use a content calendar
By laying out your blog topics in a spreadsheet by month, you will be able to keep track of which blog needs to be written next, which keywords the blog should focus on, and when each blog is due to be published.
Brainstorm content ideas
At Cariad, we hold regular content meetings, or ‘blogstorms’, to ensure that the content we have planned is interesting, educational and fresh. Make sure to review your content calendars every couple of months to check that the topics are still relevant and engaging, and don’t be afraid to write a spontaneous article to jump on an emerging industry trend or relevant piece of news. There’s no such thing as too many blog articles, and posting your take on trending news is sure to increase website traffic.
Run a content audit
Our legendary copywriter, Sarah, has a spreadsheet which keeps track of which blogs are the highest performing for each client, to give us an idea of what sort of content each target audience enjoys the most. This way we can keep choosing blog topics that are more likely to keep the readers coming back for more!
If you would like to learn more about our Content Marketing services, please don’t hesitate to give us a call on 01992 582 824 or email us at [email protected].
