Did you know that companies with a blog get 67% more leads than those who don’t have a blog? Content writing is an easy to set up and inexpensive marketing strategy that allows you to climb up in Google’s search result ranking and shows potential customers that you have the expertise to provide them with a solution for their problem. But only if your content is up to par.
Define who you are trying to reach
Starting with content writing doesn’t mean posting a couple of blog articles every once in a while, but to make sure you are setting up a solid strategy that uses the correct keywords and targets the right audience with the valuable information they are looking for.
So, before you start jotting down your first lines, take a moment to ask yourself and your team who you want to reach with the content. Who is this potential new customer and what do they want to know?
Fictional profiles of your ideal customers, based on your data and market research, are called buyer personas. These different buyer personas do not only give you a better idea of how to best address these specific audiences in your articles, but will probably give you more topics to write about.
The following steps can help you define your buyer persona:
- Take a good look at your current and previous customers: What kind of questions did they have and what attributes do they have in common?
- Dig through your website and social media data: How could you group your followers? With what types of content or which subjects do they engage?
- Try to gather more data by asking people to fill in forms in order to receive special promos or sign up for your newsletter: Ask for company size, title, and other information that may be helpful.
- Interview your customers or have them write some feedback: Ask how they found your product or service, why they like it and what convinced them you were the best option for them.
Determine the goal of your content
Now you know who your audience is and what kind of information they are looking for, you have to decide what goal you’re trying to reach with the content. The audience you are reaching with your articles are in different phases of the customer journey, so you need to have different levels of content. Some might be unaware that you or your service exist, but a post on social media will keep you top of their mind the next time they need you. Others might already be researching a problem or challenge they are facing and are considering purchasing a service or product to solve this. Here, a clear case study or use case on your website, showing how you have helped others with this exact problem, can help convert them to your client.
So, what kind of action do you want to guide them towards with your content once they’ve landed on your page? Learning more about your brand? Subscribing to one of your services? Buying a product? Let’s look at the different realistic goals you can set:
- Traffic and conversion rates: Content writing is a great way to get your website ranked higher in search results and to increase the traffic to your product pages, which in turn will hopefully lead to higher conversion rates. To be successful at this you need to use the right keywords, publish fresh content regularly and work on your link-building efforts.
- Brand awareness: By sharing your knowledge and guiding your potential customers through the first steps of solving the challenges they are facing, you can grow your brand identity and build out your reputation and reach. To give brand awareness an extra push, don’t limit yourself solely to articles on your website, but try to get your content on other websites within your niche and share them on social media.
- Leads: Even though this is probably the main goal of every company’s marketing strategy, don’t immediately rule out other options like traffic and brand awareness. These are very important objectives to build a solid customer base that loves and trusts your brand.
That said, if you want to use your blog to convert your existing traffic into leads, one of the most important things to add is CTAs or Call-To-Actions. Further down we explain what CTAs are.
Add SEO keywords to the text in a natural way
The last thing you have to do before you can start writing is create a list of relevant keywords that you can add to your text. This will make it easier for your preferred audience to find your content, but more importantly it will help search engines understand what your blog is about and to whom they should present it as a search result.
If you don’t already have your keyword research ready to go, you should:
- Make a list of relevant topics and words associated with your business and product or service.
- Create 5-10 main keyword clusters.
- List as many keywords/search terms you think your buyer personas would search for Competitor research using tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs will help you find more keywords that you perhaps didn’t even know people were using.
- Research monthly search volume for each keyword and related keywords using tools in Google Ads or an extension like Keywords Everywhere.
There is lot more to SEO, and we know it can be somewhat time consuming if you want to get it right. There are many things to consider, such as the difficulty of actually ranking for a particular keyword, finding the absolute perfect primary and secondary keyword for each page on your website and keeping track of which keywords your competitors are currently bidding for.
To help you get started, you can download our free SEO guide here. We can also help you with your initial SEO analysis, just contact us for more.
Add strong CTAs and other conversion points
When you are writing content, it helps to map it to the different customer journey stages. Content about your company and services, and other related industry content is great for brand awareness and consideration, but for someone who knows what exactly they are looking for and just need convincing that they should choose you over your competitor, you need content formats like white papers or case studies – and strong and clear CTAs, so that you can help that potential customer get in touch with you.Therefore, every article, content piece, page and social media post needs to include a strong call to action. It needs to have a purpose. Because, if you want your customers to act, you have to tell them what to do next
Written content can have many different formats of CTAs, including pop-ups, header bars, slide-ins, in-text CTAs, buttons, image CTAs, and more. You can also include links or buttons to share posts on social media or to email it to a colleague or friend. When choosing which action you’d like your reader to perform, think about your personas and the customer journey again and choose an action that fits their wishes. Are they still researching a possible purchase, then don’t immediately push your product but instead opt for a downloadable resource or related piece of content.
Did you like this read? We have more, here below you can see our related pieces on this topic:
Sources:
- https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/How-to-Start-a-Successful-Blog.pdf?hubs_post=blog.hubspot.com%2Fmarketing%2Fcontent-marketing&hubs_post-cta=Start%20a%20Successful%20Blog&hubs_offer=offers.hubspot.com%2Fhow-to-start-a-successful-blog&submissionGuid=ef65e559-2644-4034-a943-ac24d3bdd08d
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/convert-blog-readers-to-leads/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/?sh=7508710010b9
- https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/convert-blog-readers-to-leads/
