How to Plan Your Company Blog Content
It’s no secret; Content is the number one way your target audience will engage with your brand. When you’re on a roll, creating content can be a cinch to incorporate into your marketing strategy. If you’re starting out, however, it can be overwhelming! We’ve been there. We know that overwhelming feeling well. How did we go about jumping over the content creation overwhelm into a well-oiled machine? We started with blogs! Here’s exactly how we planned our blog content from scratch.
Strategy
Strategy is the foundation for anything you do in your company, so do not skimp on it for your blog content. First, how can you take your company’s goals and objectives to turn them into educational, engaging blogs? Take some time to sit with the information you already have to create blog topics that drive your audience to the products and services your company is banking on for the year. Write those topics, objectives, and goals down together.
Frequency
How often can you post? Sure you want to post a blog every week, but take a step back and consider not only your workload but that of your team (if you have one). It’s much easier to start slow and then turn up the frequency when A) you see results and B) when your team finds their groove with the new blog process. We started with two blogs a month.
Channels
What channels do you want to post on? Of course, your website! That shouldn’t be the only place though. When one piece of blog content goes out, consider creating a couple of social media posts promoting the blog on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Send out an email on Flodesk leading the reader to click through to read the entire blog. Even better? See what content you can use from that blog to repurpose it down the road. Knowing your channels means more eyes on your blog and brand engagement.
SEO
There’s no point in posting a blog on your website without it being SEO optimized otherwise it won’t be visible to your audience. To post with intention, develop a plan to conduct keyword research and create an SEO strategy that you can utilize to get your blog on the first couple pages of search results.
Pain Points
The whole point of creating content, especially blogs, is to show your audience that you know their pain. You know their day-to-day life and most importantly, how to make it better with your company’s service or product. That’s why you conducted market research in the first place. It’s time to use it heavily now. Integrate your audience personas to create topics that specifically target their pain points. That way your blogs will speak and resonate with every person in your audience.
Expertise
Ok, now that you’re armed with your strategy and know what your target audience finds as a pain point, it’s time to introduce your service or product as the solution. You helped create the service or product, so it’s time to flex your expertise. Write down everything you know about it, how it directly solves the problem then organize it all into one blog. Don't forget to include your case studies and social proof that shows your product or service doing exactly what you know it would.
Current vs. Evergreen Content
Yes, blogs may be the more time-consuming piece of content compared to its email and social media cousins because it is purely educational and long-form. But as you can tell, you shouldn’t discount blogs because they basically write emails and social media posts for you.
The absolute best reason to start with blogs is that they can be repurposed down the road. Say you are heading into the holiday season. It’s a busy time of the year! There is zero time to be creating new content. Utilize your older blog posts to create fresh new pieces of content that are fresh to the audience’s eyes while cutting the time in half for you to create new content.
This evergreen practice makes sure to recycle the blog content you already have and make it new again to your target audience. So include a good balance of new blogs and evergreen blog content. Start with making it seasonal. Then once you have a heavy backlog of content, you can start repurposing.
Need help creating your blog content strategy from start to blog post? Inquire with the team at Content Creative to help you with quality and expertise each step of the way.
