Blog marketing is part of the social media marketing umbrella which is another form of digital marketing. Business blogging is very different than personal blogging. With business blogging you need a key strategy and purpose in mind to get optimal results. If you are not bothered about a dedicated business blog strategy, why bother with blogging at all?
Content marketing using a blog for your business should have a clear focus and purpose. To ensure you get the best out of it, develop a blogging strategy that you can use as a guide when you are writing new topics to publish. What is the purpose of blogging? If you want good results – this could be in the form of traffic, sales, credibility or general awareness, your blog should reflect your business goals.
The easiest way to create a blogging plan is to create a single page containing the audience you are trying to reach, keywords, and a couple of topics that your business focuses on. You can use this one page (blogging plan) to keep your writing focused.
What is the purpose of your blog? Have a look below for a couple of examples.
- Reach new markets and clients;
- Promote your services;
- Create awareness and branding;
- Increased search engine rankings;
- Become the industry expert;
- Communication channel with customers;
Your blogging journey should begin by choosing a targeted topic that a specific audience will find interesting and that you enjoy writing about. Before you start your campaign, ask yourself these questions:
Blog marketing questions
Who is your targeted audience? This is usually your targeted customer. This may only be a small part of your customer base. Perhaps you want to write about topics you want to grow in? To give you an example: You own a hardware store and have been blogging about the latest tools that you stock, why not write about what you can do with the tools rather than writing about them.
What are your interests? Write about a topic that you are passionate and knowledgeable about. This is also the subject that your targeted readers will find interesting. Try to focus on a narrow niche but one that is broad enough that can generate a couple of future topics as well. You want the ability write a couple of blog posts about the specific topic.
Why are you blogging? You might want to brand yourself as the expert in your market and niche, improve your search engine rankings online for your website or other social media profiles, attract new customers or even promote new products that you might have. Try to narrow your writing down so that you have one primary objective to create a strong focus on what you write.
Blogging is fun and I still know out of experience that it is an excellent method to start engagement with targeted audiences. It is not a quick strategy, but do it right and you will reap the rewards.
