Blog writing is an essential part of any strategic digital marketing mix. When executed correctly, it generates tangible brand and business results. Unfortunately, many organizations are blog writing without fully maximizing all the benefits.
Whether your organization is already blog writing, or you’re thinking about getting started, here are some blog writing tips to help you optimize your existing efforts.
Blog Writing Tips: The First Steps
- Define Your Goals – Any smart initiative begins by defining your goals. When it comes to blogging, these goals can be:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing lead generation opportunities
- Increasing your rank in search engines
- Solving your customers’ questions
- Showing your brand’s expertise or sharing a Point of View (POV)
- Enhancing other brand marketing functions
- Define Your Audience – It’s imperative to know who you’re blogging for. HubSpot offers a free Buyer Persona template to help you clearly identify your audience. When defining your audience, keep the following considerations in mind. This can guide your content:
- What does your customer do?
- What are their goals?
- What are their challenges?
- Why would they not buy from you?
- What solution can you offer?
Blog Writing Format: Creating Your Content and Organization
- Brainstorm and Develop Your Content Ideas – There are numerous ways to develop relevant content for your audiences. Consider the following:
- Use your existing content, such as CEUs, white papers, customer presentations, etc.
- Conduct customer surveys or focus groups to learn what customers find useful
- Talk to your company’s thought leaders to gain topic ideas
- Develop a list of the most common questions you get from customers
- Follow industry influencers to learn what they are writing about
- Organize Your Content – Once you’ve curated all your content ideas, you can organize them by category or topic. Some of the most popular include:
- “Thought-Leadership” or “POV” Articles
- “How To” Articles
- “List” Articles
- “Expert Q&A” Articles
Blogging Writing Formalization
- Formalize Your Process – Now it’s time to formalize the process. This includes:
- Setting Up an Editorial Calendar – Plot out all articles in advance and account for key messages, keywords, images, and other essential elements.
- Establishing Tracking and Measurement – You won’t know you’re meeting your goals unless you’re measuring results and KPIs. Be sure to set up Google Analytics, HubSpot or other website tracking tools on your websites and blog pages
- Informing & Engaging Stakeholders – Get your entire organization, partners, and other stakeholders involved with the process. And get them engaging with the content!
- Set Your KPIs – With all your pieces in place, establish your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are defined as “the critical (key) indicators of progress toward an intended result.” KPI.org is an excellent resource for understanding and establishing KPIs for projects.
Next Steps
Now you’re ready to start your blog writing campaign and driving more results for your business. Here are a couple of ideas to get you on your way:
- You can download this blog article or share it with others. Click here for your free PDF.
- Effective blog article writing is an art and a science. We have a blog writing tips Best Practices Check List. This ensures your blogs are written for maximum SEO effect and intent. Click here to download your free Blog Article Writing Best Practices Check List.
- We are a HubSpot partner and a Google Premier Partner. Both of these partners have tons of resources and ideas worth investigating.
How Can We Help
Whether it’s blog writing, PR, social media or any other digital marketing service, we can help. Here are some additional resources.
Blog Writing Kick-Starter 6-Pack – The Spaulding Communications team is staffed with skilled and experienced blog writing experts. We will put together a strategic blog writing services plan and get you started with 6 blog articles – fully SEO and SEM-optimized. Contact Matt Spaulding to discuss at matts@spauldingcommunications.com
PR and Social Media Integration – We provide our clients with strategic B2B public relations and digital marketing services. If you’ve been thinking about integrating a PR or social media component to your marketing, but don’t know where to start, we can help!
We have PR Plan Options and Social Media Plan Options. Specific to B2B brands in the commercial architect, design, and construction industries, these options show three different budget levels: Starter, Intermediate, and Advanced. Each option shows the activities typically associated with each budget level. These Plan Options can help you determine what kind of budget you need and the scope of work you can expect from us.
Click here to view and download our PR Plan Options or our Social Media Plan Options!