In the early 1990s, a new way to communicate online was born. Twenty-nine years after Rob Palmer created the first blog, blogging has become an important part of many people’s lives as well as an essential tool for many businesses to establish an online presence.
You’ve been looking around online for help with marketing your business, haven’t you? Well here’s the thing: there are lots of different ways to market a business, and blog content marketing is one of them.
When marketing is about making connections with your audience, nothing is more effective than blog content that speaks directly to those people.
But isn’t creating and maintaining a website expensive? Not at all. All you need is some brain power and elbow grease, and you’ll be creating and maintaining a blog in no time!
Why Market Using Blog Content?
Finding your way around blog content marketing is a breeze. Simply create a website, and voila! You’re ready to show what your business is about.
Nowadays, making a website is easy. There are online services that make it both easy and inexpensive. Common examples of these services are Wix, Weebly, and Square.
Sometimes, creating a blog doesn’t mean a custom website. Websites like LinkedIn, Medium, and Tumblr are also great when you want to create a blog for your business. With 1.3 billion users between the three websites, you can reach out to a large pool of potential customers.
Blogging is a simple, yet powerful way to communicate what your business is about. A recent study shows that marketers that place emphasis on blogging have a 13x higher chance of creating a positive ROI.
Given that you’ll put very little money into creating a blog for your business, the higher chance of hitting a positive return on investment certainly is attractive.
Additionally, blogging is a very sizable way for content marketing. Seventy-seven percent of people online read blogs. There are 4.95 billion people worldwide that use the internet. That’s 3.8 billion people that can interact with your blog and be potential clients.
Keeping a blog updated helps you produce 97 percent more backlinks, which can be helpful in projecting a presence to the wider internet.
With the reasons to use blog content marketing aside, here are some essentials to help you create an excellent and enticing blog for your business!
7 Important Things for Blog Content Marketing
Here are the top essentials you should keep an eye on for blog content marketing.
1. Learn the Power of Content Marketing
The great thing about blog content marketing is that it offers you a variety of media to use in your website or blog. Articles, videos, audio and more are all under the umbrella of the term “content”.
With blogs, you can mix and match different media. You can write a long-form article, include an image or photo relevant to the topic, add video of an interview or simply embed a podcast. The possibilities are endless! This will also give your readers more information to digest at once, as they get more in-depth with the topic.
Blogs are a great way to establish your product as a must-have for current and potential customers. Creatively using different forms of content in your blog will help you attract new customers and keep existing ones interested.
2. Create a Marketing Strategy
In business, you need to be able to balance appealing to customers with making calculated, precise moves. Your marketing strategy will help you do that.
Gather your marketing team for a brainstorming session. Include your core team and some people who have expertise in content creation, online promotion, and social media. Keep the strategy flexible so you’re not locked into a rigid approach that may not work as well in the future.
A business’s identity is something to keep in mind while developing your strategy. A clear identity will help make sure that your strategy doesn’t conflict with the way people see you or your company.
One way to keep your learning curve low is to study current leaders in your market. Pay attention to what they do and how they manage their blog or marketing, then mold it into your own to fit your business.
This approach gives your business a voice that can be heard, while also allowing for some flexibility.
3. Use Your Tools Effectively
The point of tools is to be used for certain jobs. That’s why you want to use website building tools or blogging websites for your business and not something else.
Website building tools like the ones mentioned earlier are capable of SEO. SEO or search engine optimization is a technique used by businesses to get on the top results of popular search engines like Google or Bing.
Search engine-optimized blogs can provide an improved user experience and also help with engagement and conversions.
When you create a blog on an established platform, check to see if that website has any built-in analytics tools. Most blogging sites have some kind of page analytics that can help you gauge what works and what doesn’t.
Blogging sites aren’t the only ones with built-in analytics tools. Website builders like Wix, Weebly, and WordPress all have analytics tools to keep your blog up with the times.
Learning how to use your chosen tools is a great way to keep your website or blog page performing better than your competitors.
4. Keep Your Blog Active
As we mentioned earlier, blogging is a long-term marketing strategy. The biggest challenge with a long-term strategy is keeping it active.
The average blog post this year is 1,269 words. With long-form content being the absolute king of creating a high-performing blog site or page, many bloggers find that they need research and writing assistance to keep up with their high output.
That’s where having a marketing team comes in handy. Your marketing plan and marketing team work together in creating ideas to advertise your brand through your blog.
Don’t have a marketing team? Not a problem. Take your marketing plan as your blueprint, and everything else around you as your inspiration:
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Keep your eyes peeled for news articles that relate to your industry.
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Stay connected with other bloggers and readers in your niche. This will give you an idea of what kind of content they’re looking for so you can create your own versions of it.
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Ask your readers what they’d like to see more of on your site by way of reader polls and surveys—and then deliver.
Regardless of the topic, make sure your work is well-researched, well-written, and optimized for search engines.
In this way, your business can be seen as an authority in the market and topics you provide.
Your blog’s activity is the lifeblood of this marketing strategy. To ensure that it remains vital, develop a consistent posting schedule that keeps customers engaged with your brand’s personality and helps you get your message across more clearly than your competitors.
5. Integrate Social Media
Writing quality blog posts is good. But if no one reads them, what’s the point? Don’t let all that hard work and information go to waste by only having a handful read them. Use the vastness of social media to get more people reading your blog and learning about what you do.
Social media is an effective way to keep your audience engaged with your blog content. With over 4.48 billion users across the entire social media industry, this is a must-have tool for your blog content marketing plan.
Using social media to link your blog posts is great for visibility. Your posts also have a chance to become viral which can skyrocket CTR [click-through rate] numbers and engagements.
6. Listen to Customer Feedback
As in any marketing strategy, customer feedback is a tool in itself. It is an excellent indicator of whether your plans and strategies are working or not.
Customers love to feel that they are being heard and that you are willing to adapt your business to their needs. A great way of keeping your blog search engine friendly is to ask your customers for feedback. They can provide insights and ideas on topics they’re searching for and would like to know more about.
Flexibility is the name of the game. Listening to customer feedback is an excellent way of keeping your customer engaged while keeping up with current trends in your market.
Read here to learn more about customer loyalty.
7. Keep It Original
Fresh ideas are the lifeblood of good writing, but you should always give credit to your sources. Plagiarism is not an option when it comes to blogging. If you are found guilty of plagiarizing content, you could face serious consequences.
Plagiarism analysis tools can help you keep your content clean of plagiarism while keeping creativity at the maximum.
Your posts having the same idea as your competitor can’t be helped. But adding something new to the work or improving upon it is not plagiarism; it is innovation.
Original or inspired works can help you stay ahead of your competition. Not only will you show off your creativity, but you will bring in a new perspective and personality to the topic.
People discover your brand through the articles that you write, but they really get to know you through your personality and through the snippets of personality that you reveal. When you create a blog that is driven by your personality, you add something extra that makes people pay attention and want to follow along with your journey.
TL;DR…
Blog content marketing is one of the easiest ways to integrate digital marketing into your business. It’s cost-efficient to run, and it brings many checkmarks to your marketing goals. Its benefits are undeniable, and it’s likely that you’ll have success if you take the time to create a blog that will lend itself to long-term traffic generation
With simple strategies such as search engine optimization and media mix-matching, your business will have a more powerful voice than your competitors. Although there are tools that may help you with content marketing, you are still in charge of making those decisions and leading your business to success.
Remember, blog content marketing’s goal, just like any marketing strategy, is to put customer experience at the front. Satisfied customers will always bring success to any business venture. You don’t need to be a professional writer in order to succeed with your content. If you choose topics your audience finds interesting, engage them with great writing and research, and provide value through your posts, readers will find your blog and tell their friends about it.
