The need to invest into a healthy, robust content strategy can be a game changer for your business. The benefits to your SEO, increasing organic traffic and establishing your brand as a topical authority is a great investment of time, energy and effort. Being the co-founder of several digital agencies, I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the past ten years. Trust me, we get it. Running a business—especially a small business, takes an inordinate amount of your time. From doing inventory, to ordering supplies, scheduling employees, to paying the bills, the last thing you want to do after clocking in another 12-14 hour grind is sit down and have to write a blog. Fortunately there are a plethora of very talented freelance copywriters on the market, many of which have domain expertise that you can outsource the content creation to.
But before you dive into the creative pool of writing blogs, it will be infinitely easier if you first make a plan before you start publishing articles.
This old adage not only applies to wood working, it’s also applicable to formulating a healthy content strategy. The first part of crafting that strategy involves research. We recommend taking the time to analyze your competitors.
Start by entering keywords into a Google search bar. Use phrases that are applicable to your business or industry. Ask Google questions that a prospective customer would use to search for your business, such as: “What are the best rated landscapers near me?” Not only take note as to where you website is ranked on the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page), but use this opportunity to check out your competition. Don’t limit yourself to just your local competition either. Try other parts of the country. Look at the type of blogs being reproduced. Take copious notes of inspiration with respects to blog topics. While your doing this competitive exercise, bookmark the websites that you like, should your own website be in need of a makeover.
As a general rule websites should be redesigned every 2-3 years.
Don’t limit your research to just to other businesses’ websites. The next phase of creating a content strategy involves turning inward, as you go about creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, generalized representation of your customers. Developing buyer personas–also sometimes referred to as a buyer profile or customer persona, is a great starting point in understanding your customers. By leveraging such things as demographic data and discovering what motivates them to buy your product or service and the challenges they are facing, when understanding your ideal buyer persona.
Depending upon your company and whether or not your business is B2B (Business To Business) or B2C (Business To Consumer) it will determine the number of buyer personas you need. If your customers are businesses, then you buyer personas may be a position or role that can be easily defined. For example, suppose your business provides technology services to large enterprise organizations, then your ideal customer persona might be an IT Director or Chief Information Officer.
If you own a B2C business, where you are selling products or services to consumers, you may have several buyer personas. Using demographical data such as sex, age, income and lifestyle will be essential in assisting you. Our WUNDERWORX platform is ideally suited to gathering this information on your customers. Check out latest blog on Knowing Your Customers to get a better insight how we can help.
Zig Ziglar, best selling author, salesman, and motivational speaker summed it up best when he said, “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.” Regardless if you are selling B2B or B2C, understanding your clients’ pain points is one of the most important details you need to uncover for your buyer personas. Discovering pain points helps you position your product or service in a way that resonates emotionally with your prospect customers. Knowing the emotional reasons that trigger responses from your prospective customers also helps you find and refine your brand’s voice and tone when it comes to writing content for your website.
Now that you have created your ideal buyer personas, we recommend spending the time to do proper keyword research. Because content is so critical to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can build a comprehensive list of words that can be used when you begin formulating the different topics of your articles. The purpose of inserting keywords into your blogs is not to game the system, but rather make sure that your content is being optimized for search engine optimization.
Blogging is an opportunity to step on a soap box, but keep in mind the number one goal of your blogs is to provide valuable information to your audience. Avoid the practice of keyword stuffing when writing for your website or blog. Craft your content so it reads as if a human wrote it, not some keyword inserting robot.
One of the questions I am often asked with regards to content creation, is how many blogs should one create per month? There is no hard fast rule with respect to how often a company should blog. I do know that once you start blogging it’s easy to get distracted with the day-to-day operations of your business, and before you know it weeks, months or heaven forbid years go by before you post your next blog. An ignored blog is a poor reflection of your brand.
Blogging is a commitment and it should be adhered to. I usually recommend 2-3 internal blog posts a month with the goal of publishing 1-2 external blogs per quarter as a starting point. Creating a content calendar is a great way to avoid having long gaps between blog posts. It not only organizes your thoughts for different blogs, but assigning a publishing date can be a great reminder to add new content to your website. Should you use freelance writers, sharing the Google Calendar will keep everyone organized to their assignments and ensure the investment of good content is being published in a timely manner.
Amplify believes in a more human approach to advertising. Let us demonstrate how you can reduce wasted ad spend and time to conversion by implementing an omni-channel strategy that amplifies your SEO, Paid Search, Content and Programmatic strategies. If you would like to learn more about shifting your marketing strategies to grow your marketshare and bottom line, let’s have a conversation.