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Blogs are so essential to digital marketing that it’s difficult to picture life without them. They direct potential buyers to your website, raise brand recognition, display industry authority, and serve as springboards for future involvement.

digital marketing blogs strategies 2023

However, if you approach blogging without a well-thought-out content strategy, you may as well be yelling into the void. Let’s examine what it takes to develop a successful blog content plan.

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10 Steps To Start A Successful Blog content in 2023

Everything About Your Content Strategy Should Be Documented
Give Your Blog a Specific Goal
Choose What Content Will Be Featured on Your Blog
Determine Who Will Read Your Blog Audience
Analyze the Market and the Competing
Perform Keyword Research
Create a Voice for Your Blog
Create Out Your Timetable
Begin Creating Blog Content
Promote Your Blog on social media

1. Everything About Your Content Strategy Should Be Documented

“Hold on a minute,” you might say, “how can I outline a content strategy that does not yet exist?” That’s a good question. Okay, so this isn’t the very first stage in the process. However, you must ensure that you create a thorough record of your approach to follow and refer to from the start.

Even if you conduct frequent stakeholder meetings with content producers, strategists, marketers, analysts, and other members of the team, you are failing to codify your content strategy.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, almost one-third (32%) of B2B marketers that rely on a content strategy conveyed verbally think their content marketing activities are effective. In contrast, 60% of those that have a written content strategy can claim the same.

So, what should you record? Everything. Seriously, write everything down so that everyone is on the same page and has a thorough history of the measures your marketing team has made.

Here are a few important things to remember:

Content marketing objectives
Past, present, and future campaigns
Editorial schedule.
Campaign, promotion, and individual blog post metrics
Results of A/B testing

Like muscle memory, documenting your blog content plan should become second nature.

Do you want to know which headlines and themes are most popular with your target demographic or attract the most traffic to your website?

Or look into why certain advertisements succeed while others fail. You have the records and data to determine this.

Content strategy in digital marketing is a continually changing endeavor, and integrating previous results with current data can help you stay ahead of trends and achieve long-term success.

2.Give Your Blog a Specific Goal

Before you get into the nitty-gritty of developing a blog content strategy, you must first define your goals for your website’s blog. This sort of content may be used for a variety of objectives and aims, including increasing brand recognition and nurturing leads.

Before you begin developing a blog content strategy, you should have a clear understanding of your marketing objectives. This will allow you to make the best selections for both overall campaigns and individual blog entries.

Consider the following blog content applications:

Increasing visitors to your website.
Changing site visitors into qualified leads
Keeping consumers aware of business news and product releases.
Educating potential customers on your products and services.
Telling the narrative of your brand.

A blog can do any one of these things, and it’s critical to have a strategy in place from the start.

Your content objectives will also determine which metrics to track and prioritize. If you just want more visitors to your website, analyzing organic traffic and page views can tell you if you’re on track. Of course, you must delve deeper to gain a more sophisticated knowledge of how site users are reacting to your content.

3.Choose What Content Will Be Featured on Your Blog

Clearly, you’ll use blog entries to populate your blog page, but what about other sorts of content? Many organizations utilize their blog sites to include a variety of material, including news stories, case studies, customer testimonials, press releases, and other pieces.

This technique is not always recommended because visitors must take extra efforts to find the material they are looking for (for instance, filtering out company updates and promotional content). You want to make it as simple as possible for audience members to discover the information they are looking for.

A more structured strategy that dedicates distinct pages to blogs, case studies, and downloadable assets, among other sorts of content, can also make tracking the effectiveness of your best digital marketing blogs team easier. You may develop a greater understanding of the user experience and the steps users take on their route to completing a conversion — such as reading a white sheet or registering up for an email list — or even a sale.

4.Determine Who Will Read Your Blog Audience

Writing blogs without a clear target audience is like to driving without a destination. You could arrive where you need to go, but only by chance, and you’ll lose a lot of time, energy, and money in the process.

Every blog article you write should be tailored to a specific segment of your audience, addressing the topics that are most important to them and giving useful insights and advice that will have the most impact. You should already have a complete list of buyer personas, influencers, and other critical audience categories. If not, put your blog writing on wait until you’ve fleshed out those audience profiles.

We have several thorough persona guides to help you define your various audience profiles, but here’s a basic introduction to get you started:

Using Google Analytics, your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and other data sources, collect information about your audience.

Determine your target audience’s primary requirements, issues, and pain points.

Determine what topics various client groups want to read about so that you can adjust your messaging and content to their tastes.

Compile audience profiles based on demographics, psychographics (such as preferences, dislikes, and fundamental values), pain areas, preferred channels, and optimal content genres.{alertSuccess}

With this information, you can adapt each blog to a specific target segment and give each piece of content a defined purpose.

Take, for example, this article. What information does a content producer or CEO need to know about developing a blog content strategy? Most likely not. However, this article should be highly useful for any digital marketers out there (fingers crossed). This is for you.

5.Analyze the Market and the Competing

After you’ve identified your target personas, you can begin sorting through the kind of material they’ll find most helpful. It never hurts to examine your rivals’ websites to discover what works for them and what you can reproduce on your own.

Moreover, where are the gaps in the competition’s blog content strategy? There may be significant themes or content pieces that your competitors have overlooked, providing you with an excellent opportunity to gain an advantage in the continuing digital marketing strategy.

Do you want to stand out from the crowd?

Then, take on themes that your rivals haven’t covered before, or put your own twist on well-worn issues.

Not sure where to begin?

There are several content marketing systems available to assist you with conducting market and competition research, identifying prospective keywords, and brainstorming specific subjects. SEMRush, for example, provides a variety of competition analysis tools to assist you in determining which pages are driving the most traffic to your competitors’ sites, what keywords they’re ranking for, and where you might fill in the gaps.

Even if you’re not certain who all of your primary rivals are beyond the top few, performing market research with the aid of these tools should help you figure it out.

6.Perform Keyword Research

You can truly get into the search engine optimization (SEO) component of your content marketing plan now that you have your audience profiles, competitive analysis, and market research.

Begin sketching out keywords for your blog content plan using the same content marketing tools.

Whether or whether organic traffic is a main objective for your site’s blog, your pages must rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) so that people can find your material.

Landing on the first page of search results is no longer a guarantee that people will visit your website. In 2019, the top three search results account for 75% of all clicks on Google SERPs. With the top three slots consuming so much attention and leaving the bottom seven to compete for the remaining 25% of consumers merely reaching the first page is no longer enough.

A closer examination of Page 1 SERP trends reveals a clear example of the haves vs. the have nots. According to a July 2020 survey, 28.5 percent of Google searches result in the user clicking on the first link they encounter. The click-through rate drops from there, with the second slot accounting for 15.7 percent of clicks and the tenth spot accounting for only 2.5 percent.

Creating a list of focused keywords provides you with lots of ideas for blog material, especially if you ever have writer’s block or feel like your creative well has run dry. SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs, and other content marketing tools may also direct you to relevant search questions connected to your core keywords, allowing you to broaden the scope of your blog content strategy or include numerous high-priority terms in a single blog article

Keep Your Keyword Prospects in Check

In an ideal world, any search query would be available, with quality material distinguishing the top performers from the rest. There are some keywords that brands will never rank for, such as terms that are directly related to their services and goods. With keywords dominated by industry leaders, the competition is simply too severe to break through.

Always keep the amount of competition in mind while performing keyword research so that you can dedicate your time and money to queries for which you have a real chance of reaching the top few SERP positions. A consistent mix of search keywords that are relevant to your business, important to your audience, and reachable as ranking objectives is required for effective keyword analysis.

Content marketers must increasingly consider on-SERP SEO when developing keyword lists and developing blog strategies to target those search queries. With above-the-fold results such as highlighted snippets, picture carousels, and response boxes consuming impressions, marketers face even more competition for the attention of search engine users.

Beyond the basic data offered by best SEO keyword research tools, your content marketing team should check SERPs for each keyword you’re targeting. To set reasonable expectations, examine the layout of those SERPs, preferably utilizing heat maps. Do the highlighted snippets, answer boxes, knowledge graphs, and other results above the fold deliver the information that users seek? Are they inclined to explore beyond the first five organic results?

7.Create a Voice for Your Blog

Every blog, especially when commenting on industry trends and changes, requires a strong point of view. It’s also critical to have a distinct voice for your blog so that each article matches your brand and messaging.

Because the voice of your blog is an extension of your brand, take the time to establish what that involves. It is critical that you customize your style and tone to the expectations and preferences of your target audience. A light and irreverent tone may appeal to some consumer groups, but it may come across as glib when discussing year-end audits or SEC requirements with the financial services set.

Here are some techniques to brand voice:

Inspiring and encouraging.
Pleasant and informative.
Professional and aspirational.
Goofy, if not outright strange.

Whatever direction you take, you don’t want your blog to be overly stuffy or thick. After all, blogs must be readable. People will tune you out if you drag them down with jargon and unending walls of text.

8.Create Out Your Timetable

You’ve established your target audience, selected keywords, and defined your brand voice – now it’s time to start planning your content schedule. An editorial calendar is one of the most useful tools for digital B2B marketers, since it provides a comprehensive visual representation of every blog, white paper, infographic, social media post, marketing email, and video you have planned.

Content calendars are critical for organizing digital marketing blog efforts across several teams and stakeholders. For example, you should plan blog posts far enough in advance so that content writers have the time to research, create, and edit articles in order to meet your email marketing timetables. The same is true for blogs that support other sorts of content, such as gated assets like white papers and eBooks.

Begin by putting out content ideas and prospective blog themes based on your keyword list, buyer profiles, and competitor research. Examine similar pieces that have done well to get an idea of the sort of headline that will catch people’s attention, as well as what subheadings and relevant themes to include. And remember to keep those blogging strategy goals in mind while planning your forthcoming material. If growing organic traffic is your primary aim, for example, make sure you have some eye-catching headlines in the works.

Don’t only think about the next several weeks. Build up your editorial schedule with blog post ideas at least three months ahead of time. This manner, you can offer authors plenty of time.

9.Begin Creating Blog Content

It’s been a long road, but you’re finally ready to put pen to paper and start producing blog entries. Every step you’ve done will contribute to the creative process, selecting what topics to discuss and how to write about them. It’s simply a matter of putting those concepts together in a way that will resonate with your audience.

Your writing staff should have adequate research materials and subject matter experience to develop quality content that connects with your target audience, but there are a few practical considerations to bear in mind when you start producing content in earnest:

Formatting and layout: Design your blog so that users may effortlessly move across the page and absorb material. To break up lengthier material, use subheadings, bulleted or numbered lists, custom graphics, photos, and other media instead of large blocks of text. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Would you continue reading?

Length: What should the optimal length of a blog article be? It all depends. Blog postings might be longer or shorter depending on the depth of the topic. Giving your content producers enough space to properly investigate and flesh out the issue at hand without padding things out with irrelevant material is a smart rule of thumb.

Call to activity: Websites are not the first destination for site visitors; rather, they represent the beginning of the buyer journey. A call to action (CTA) directs readers to the next steps in connecting with your brand, such as exploring content and learning more about what you stand for and how you can assist.{alertSuccess}

10.Promote Your Blog on social media

Once your blog is up on your website, you can either wait for people to find it or go to work spreading the word through other digital channels. A good content digital marketing blog strategy may be the difference between a successful blog and one that never gets a dedicated following.

A effective content strategy leverages the capabilities of numerous channels to attract traffic to your website and reach as many potential customers as possible.

Concentrate your content digital marketing efforts in the following areas:

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are examples of social media sites.
Email marketing initiatives, such as newsletters and lead-generation emails
Link-building tactics using external media sites and pieces previously published on your website.

Organic traffic remains the most dependable technique to increase traffic to blog sites, but make sure to cover all of your bases to get as many eyes on your material as possible.

Forbes Tech