Do you have a business blog? Here’s why you REALLY need a strategy

Many marketers and businesses don’t really put together a detailed strategy to outline their blogging objectives

Content marketing is well-known as one of the most effective forms of business promotion; and out of all content marketing tactics, blogging is arguably the best-performing and most cost-effective tactic.

In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how to develop a blogging strategy from start to finish. You’ll learn:

• Why blogging is such an effective form of content marketing
• How to set quality objectives for your blogging strategy
• How to perform content and keyword research to improve your content
• How to put together an editorial calendar and come up with great headlines and topics for your blog
• How to create a promotional strategy for your blog to improve your overall results
• As well as how to measure your results from blogging so you can improve your blogging strategy and generate better results, month after month

But why not just…start blogging? Why do you need an actual blogging strategy before you start? Well, read on and you’ll find out.

What is a blogging strategy?

There are several important aspects to a blogging strategy.

The first step, as with any marketing strategy, is understanding and establishing your blogging objectives. You set clear goals for yourself so that every step you take following this will be specifically designed to help you achieve these goals.

Once you have established these goals, the big question is, how do you measure them? How do you know that you’ve achieved a certain objective? Or, put simply, you need to find out what your KPIs are – key performance indicators.

Blogging also requires a lot of research, especially if you’re going to use it to promote your business. You need to know who you’re writing for, who forms your target audience, and what they want to read about – that is, if you want them to become regular readers of your blog.

Of course, creating a blogging strategy is a lot more complex than this abbreviated version – it’s a lot to get into though, so if you’re interested to find out more, make sure to check out the Blogging Strategy Quick Win.

And if you’re still not convinced that you need a blogging strategy, read on:

You need to know what you want to achieve

In theory, the reason why businesses use blogging is that they want better results, more traffic, and more leads.

However, that is way too general; if you want to truly make the most out of each piece of content you publish, you need to be much clearer about what you want to achieve.

That is because when you know exactly what you want to achieve – whether it is more traffic, better SEO, more leads, and so on – you can craft your content and your entire strategy around achieving those exact goals.

Want to improve your websites’ domain authority within the next year? Then you should probably write more evergreen content.

Want to increase your traffic by 30% in the next 6 months? Then post more interactive content, more how-to guides, and more listicles.

Objectives are also important they help you establish your KPIs – which you can later use to optimize and improve your blogging strategy for better results.

Because you don’t know what works and what doesn’t

It’s easy to assume you know what your audience wants to read about. Or you might think that just because you like a certain type of blog post, that means your audience will too.

But that is not always the case and it’s important to remember that you’re not writing for yourself, but for your audience.

One of the essential aspects of creating a blogging strategy is research: research into your audience and who they are exactly (ages, genders, location, interests, needs, occupations, and so on) and research into the content that is being shared in your niche.

What types of articles get the most shares?

What type of content are your competitors publishing on their blog?

What are the keywords that your audience are looking up on search engines?

What content formats does your audience prefer?

These – and many others – are very important questions to answer, and knowing these answers can make a huge difference to the success of your blog and to reaching your objectives and even surpassing them.

Learn and improve

As I mentioned before, goal-setting and KPIs are essential elements of blogging for business.

And it’s not just about giving you focus – but also about improving your future strategies.

Most bloggers, whether for personal or business, will probably check their traffic and social media share stats religiously, desperately looking for any spikes. And they might even learn a thing or 2 from that – like how a certain blog post got a lot of traffic than average and how they can replicate that success.

But when you set objectives and KPIs from the start, you can learn so much more.

Whether you’ve achieved your goals or not, there is one question that you need to answer:

Why?

Why did you achieve the goal? Why didn’t you?

Usually, it all boils down to a few elements that can cause you to reach or not reach your goals:

• The content format – perhaps your audience just doesn’t like long blog posts and prefer videos, short posts, and infographics, for example
• The content topic – which topics resonated best with your audience? Which didn’t? Use this knowledge to start focusing more on the content that your audience finds most valuable
• The promotional strategy – your blog posts might be amazing, but without a good promotional strategy in place, it will be difficult to drive great results. Should you try more/different channels?

Save time and money and be more organized

Ironically, the reason why many don’t put together a blogging strategy is that it’s an extra effort. More work.

And sure, it does require hours of research and maybe some heated discussions with co-workers, but ultimately, creating a strategy will keep you focused on what matters and thus helping you save time and money in the long run.

Conclusion

Blogging for business has become a must – almost as much of a must as social media marketing now. It’s an extremely effective marketing tactic, but many businesses don’t really take the time to properly strategize it.

This is truly a necessity – especially as you’re competing with so many other similar blogs – as it allows you to build a better blog with more effective content. But, we’ve discussed the benefits of creating a strategy in detail: if you want to learn more about how to actually come up with a strategy, you can check out my Blogging Strategy Quick Win here to learn the exact steps of putting together your very own business blogging strategy – from setting blogging goals to creating and promoting content, and to measuring and analysing your blog performance for continuous improvement.