Blogging is the engine that drives so much of your inbound marketing efforts. It’s also a creative challenge and involves a fair amount of time to accomplish. Because it is so important to your lead generating/sales efforts, you definitely want to approach it in a work smart, not hard way. We’re here to give you some tips on how to ensure that your efforts yield the greatest results.
The most important tool you will have for creating impactful blogs is your buyer persona. With this as your guide, you can “see” the person you are speaking because you have already done the homework needed to know who they are, the needs they have, challenges and pain points.
Brainstorming Sessions
Armed with this information, you can see with their eyes and determine what content will be the most compelling to them. At this point, you’ll want to brainstorm on article topic ideas. Taking the time to map out article topics now means that when you do sit down to write, you have a starting point and your creative efforts can be applied solely to the topic at hand. Brainstorming also plants the topics in your head where you can begin processing them. Without even thinking about it, you will walk through your day accumulating the information that will inform your post.
Build Lists
Create multiple lists. One can be on general content. Others can be more specific based on different parts of the buyer’s journey, specific pain points/challenges that your buyers have or segmented by solutions your company offers. The goal here is to be able to generate as many topics as you can in a way that triggers the most creative responses from you and your team.
Conduct Keyword Research
Whether you are undertaking this task on your own, or with a group, getting some outside input can help motivate the process. One tool that not only can give you ideas, but help make your content more searchable is to do keyword searches. Check out this page from our friends at Hubspot for a quick primer on keyword searches and some keyword search tools. Plugging in a one or two word keyword and seeing what the most popular searches are can trigger new blog post ideas.
Once you have the list(s”) to work off of, go over them again and weed out blogging topics that on second look either don’t seem to work, or don’t address your buyer’s needs sufficiently. You also want to make sure these are topics your company has solutions for.
SEE ALSO: WHY YOUR MARKETING PLANS SHOULD ALWAYS START WITH A BUYER PERSONA
The purpose with your blogging is to be a valuable resource to your visitors. You know what solutions you offer them, and your blogging should reinforce that in subtle ways. You are not trying to hit them over the head with what you have to sell here. The intent, particularly if it is geared at attracting new visitors, is to inform. Their evolving understanding of your company’s ability to fulfill their needs will come from you knowing who they are, and your understanding of what there goals, needs, challenges and pain points are.
This will inform your blogging story and give you a framework to work within. Remember though, that these initial steps work in a kind of vacuum. You have done your best to develop your buyer’s persona and create content that addresses their needs. Once you begin publishing your content, you will now have real World experience on which topics resonate the most and draw the most visitors. Use your metrics to refine your topic lists.
SEE ALSO: EYEMAGINE NAMED A HUBSPOT PLATINUM PARTNER AGENCY
The blogging story you tell matters. When you are able to demonstrate to your reader that you know who they are, they will trust you. This trust will be the differentiator between buying from you or your competitor. That is the beauty of inbound marketing.
