If you are wondering how to create a blog strategy, you are in the right place.
When done correctly, a blog strategy can help you grow your business on autopilot by leveraging an organic content funnel. According to IMPACT, small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads.
If you are in a high-ticket b2b service niche, it is likely that you will still need to conduct phone calls or virtual meetings with clients to close details.
Yet, a strong blog strategy can allow you to delegate many of the sales and marketing activities you are currently doing. Because blogs can help you attract, educate, and convert strangers into leads.
This might sound simple, but it’s not that easy to execute.
In this blog, I will go over several key points on how to create a blog strategy that allows you to grow your business on autopilot by becoming the go-to expert in your niche.
Contents
What should be included in a blog strategy?
Before going into the details of a blog strategy, you need to have a clear business strategy.
So that you can pick a business goal you want to achieve with your blog strategy.
Most often, blog strategy and content marketing are associated with marketing. But a blog can be much more than that. You could even leverage a blog for employee onboarding, customer support, and more.
Yet, in this article, we will focus on leveraging blogs for sales and marketing activities.
The five steps you need to take to create a successful blog strategy are:
- Defining a goal
- Understanding your audience
- Developing a content strategy
- Choosing the right technology stack
- Gathering and analyzing data to optimize
Let’s cover each of these in detail.
Defining a goal for your blog strategy
In a high-ticket b2b business, a client needs to be in contact with a human when making a buying decision.
Low-ticket items, anything below $1,000, can be sold purely through content and a website. Anything higher than that will require human interaction.
For that reason, in most b2b cases, the goals for your blog strategy should be related to generating or capturing demand for your services. In this article, we will focus on blog strategies to capture demand.
In this case, the main goal should be revenue that can be attributed to leads generated through blogs.
Now, in b2b, sales cycles can sometimes take several months. For that reason, you need to track other variables to measure the success of the strategy even if sales are not coming in yet.
You can have impressions, clicks, engagement, and email list growth as key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor your blog strategy’s weekly or monthly performance.
Understanding your audience
To create blog content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand their needs, preferences, and behavior.
This involves:
- Creating buyer personas: fictional profiles of your ideal customers that capture their demographics, interests, challenges, and goals.
- Conducting market research: using surveys, interviews, and analytics to gather insights on your audience’s behavior, pain points, and preferences.
It seems obvious, but most people avoid this step, which is why their blog content doesn’t resonate with their ideal clients. Also, it’s important for you to think about who is conducting the research and consuming the content. Your client, and final decision maker, might be a small business owner.
Yet, the content might be consumed by the Chief Revenue Officer or the Head of Marketing. It’s key to think about all of these possibilities to address the content to the right person.
Here are some questions we include in all of our blog content briefs to make sure that we are doing everything possible to understand our audience:
- Who is asking the questions?
- What is that person struggling with?
- What are they feeling?
- If they were in front of you, how would they be acting?
- What are their initial questions? What are their follow-up questions?
- What objections will they have to my answers?
By knowing your audience, you can create content that addresses their needs, interests, and questions to build trust.
Developing a content strategy
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when leveraging blogs is that they begin creating content without a clear strategy.
They start creating content about a wide range of topics, which is not great. It’s much better to cover one topic in detail because it lets Google know that you have “topical authority,” and it’s much more likely that your blog will rank higher, which will drive more traffic to your website.
Let’s say you are a wealth management firm that has decided to use blogs to grow. The typical blogs that they start creating look like this:
- How to start investing
- Managing your cash
- Partial Roth conversions
- Retirement distribution strategies
As you can see, these topics are all over the place. Someone who is thinking about partial roth conversions or retirement distributions strategies is likely not looking to learn about how to start investing.
It’s likely they have been investing for a while.
It would be much more valuable to think about a particular investor profile and then create all the content they need to make a decision about who to trust for their wealth management.
A blog strategy to build topical authority for the case of someone who is looking for a wealth management firm to preserve wealth might look something like this:
- What are the fee structures of wealth advisors
- Top wealth management firms in Houston
- Examples of potential returns from wealth management firms
- Asset protection strategies
- How to do Insurance planning
- Risk mitigation management to preserve wealth
This is not a perfect strategy, but it’s much more focused than the first example.
A good content strategy should focus on building topical authority and prioritizing end-of-the-funnel keywords so that the blogs start attracting people close to making a buying decision and you can see tangible results as quickly as possible.
For example, I’m sure that “How to build and preserve wealth” is a valuable topic because many people are searching for it. But it might not be the best to pursue initially because whoever is searching for that might not be close to deciding to work with a wealth management firm.
Choosing the right technology stack
The right tech stack can simplify content creation.
The content management system you pick (Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, etc.) will depend on your budget as well as the size and experience of your team.
A platform like WordPress can simplify many components of improving the user experience of your blog and overall website. Yet, it might need a bit more technical knowledge than others.
Consider factors such as:
- Your technical skills and resources
- Your budget and hosting requirements
- Your customization and scalability needs
- Your SEO and security considerations
Choosing the right platform for your blog will set you up for success by managing your content efficiently.
Make sure to make a decision in line with your current as well as near-future needs. Because if you outgrow your current platform, you will need to migrate your website, which is costly and challenging.
Gathering and analyzing data to optimize
Having a blog without a way to gather data is like throwing darts with your eyes closed.
You might get lucky and hit the target, but you will have no idea how you got there and what you need to do when you need to improve.
Measuring your blog’s performance is important because it allows you to determine whether your efforts are achieving the desired results.
You can assess your blog strategy’s effectiveness and identify improvement areas by tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement, leads, and conversions.
Additionally, analyzing your blog’s performance can help you understand your audience better and tailor your content and promotional tactics to their preferences and behavior.
How to use data to optimize your blog strategy over time:
To optimize your blog strategy over time, you need to use data to inform your decisions and actions. Here are some steps you can take:
Define your key performance indicators (KPIs): These are the metrics that matter most to your blog goals.
For example, if your goal is to drive traffic, your KPIs might include website visits, page views, and bounce rate. If your goal is to generate leads, your KPIs might include conversion rate, form submissions, and email signups.
Use analytics tools to track your KPIs: Many analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can help you track your blog’s performance.
By monitoring your KPIs regularly, you can identify trends, patterns, and anomalies that indicate areas for improvement.
Experiment with different content and promotional tactics: Based on your data analysis, you can experiment with different content formats, topics, and promotional tactics to see what works best for your audience.
For example, you might create more videos or infographics, target different keywords, or partner with different influencers.
Measure and compare your results: After implementing changes to your blog strategy, you should measure and compare your results to see if they have improved.
Tracking your KPIs consistently allows you to assess the impact of your optimizations and refine your approach over time.
By analyzing and optimizing your blog strategy regularly, you can ensure that your efforts are aligned with your goals and audience and that you are maximizing the return on your investment in blogging.
What is the key to a successful blog?
The key to a successful blog will depend on the goals you have set up for your blog strategy.
The key, then, would be to ensure you align your content strategy with your business strategy. Creating a blog strategy to grow awareness about your business will look completely different than a blog strategy to grow revenue.
Now, you might have a strategy that includes both of these goals, but the key is to align all the elements we have described in this blog.
Goals, audience, content strategy, technology stack, and analytics need to be in synch for your to have a successful blog strategy.
Want more insights on how to create a blog strategy for your business?
If you want to learn more about how blogs can help you grow your business on autopilot, check our article where we cover the 3 steps businesses need to take to leverage blogs to grow their revenue (without leaving home or the office).
Also, we have an in-depth comparison of a $1,500 blog vs. a $150 blog so that you can have an idea of what you can expect to pay, and what you’ll get at each price point, when investing in blogs.
And whenever you are ready, you can book a call with me to brainstorm potential blog strategies for your business.
