You’re clear on your goals, your audience, and you’ve crafted a concise message, so now what?
The importance of blogging is easily dismissed. People think that it’s time-consuming and that there’s already a plethora of content out there. And both of those things are 100% true, but it’s time-consuming because the payoff can be huge, and nothing worthwhile is ever quick (also the reason why there’s so much competition), so you can’t afford to let blogs take a backseat in your marketing strategy. The importance of authentic content marketing in a sea of AI-generated posts can’t be underestimated.
- It’s a perfect opportunity to show your thought leadership
- You can share industry insights to prove your understanding as an authority in your space
- Show potential investors and partners that you’re current, operational and expert
- Provide your social team with authentic, signed off and on-brand content for sharing to your social channels – that links back to your website
- Attract clients and talent by showing your personality online
- Enrich core product or service pages with opportunities to discover more
B2B buyers consume an average of 13 content pieces before deciding on a vendor.
HOME TRUTHS
But what’s the point? Isn’t blogging outdated?
First of all, how dare you! Google has spent a lot of energy recently making changes to the algorithm based on what it calls ‘helpful content’. It’s about damn time, really, and something we have long advocated. The purpose of the update is to make it easier to find high-quality ‘helpful’ content rather than content that’s purely churned out for SEO purposes. This change means authentic content that speaks to its true audience will be firmly favoured over low-quality keyword-heavy written-for-the-sake-of-it pages, the very worst kind of pages.
- Provides content that can be repurposed across social media platforms, emails, and marketing collateral
- Promotes products and services
- Gives insight into you as a brand/business
- Drives conversions
- Boosts your SEO through relevant keywords and links
- Boosts your presence in the industry, which in turn also helps SEO through E-E-A-T signals
- Can be utilised for PR purposes
DID YOU KNOW?
In fact, 70% of people would rather read a blog or article to learn about a company than via an advert.
But to stay seen, trusted, and up to date, you need to add regular, authoritative content to your website.
Note: By regular, we don’t mean throwing four blogs a week into the ether and hoping for the best. The key here is consistency and quality.
When you sit down to write a blog, ask yourself, “What’s the point?” If you’re unsure who you’re writing it for or why, you need to take a step back.
MAKE DO AND MEND (SOMETIMES)
Lean on what you have already and broaden your content spread by recycling.
- RFP – Are you constantly answering the same questions in tenders? If it’s not confidential, do you answer these questions front and centre on your site?
- Case Studies
- White Papers and technical documents
- Podcast write-up and link
- Vlog write-up and link
- Webinar write-up with recording link
- Ebooks
- Interviews with partners, suppliers or key members of your team
- Re-writing previously well-received but outdated content
WASTE NOT WANT NOT
The importance of a regular content review
If you have a blog on your website, before you begin creating anything new, review what’s already there. Remove outdated content and look at what tools and pieces of content you have at your disposal. If you can repurpose an existing blog and improve it, it’s so much better than creating extra content that might compete against what you already have.
Evergreen content will serve your website well, so look out for those pieces of content you wrote a year or two ago that could use regular updates. Whether it’s annually, monthly, or even weekly, make sure they’re in the content calendar!
In fact, by removing outdated or unhelpful content from your site, you’ll actually help your other content rank higher, thanks to Google’s Helpful Content algorithm update.
Plus, did you know that every bit of content you write adds to your CO2 emissions? Don’t push out content just because; consider the value. If you haven’t considered your audience, who are you writing it for and what question are you trying to answer? And, if it feels outdated or no longer serves a purpose, it’s wasting energy and time sitting on the internet, two of your most valuable resources. Consider your content before and after you write it. The planet will thank you!
don't gate keep the gold
Eke out expertise
If we had a penny for every minute we spend in discovery meetings discussing the company’s activity, saying, “That’s so cool that you do that – is it on your website?” and the answer is a guilty shift of the eyes and a downward cast shake of the head. We could afford… at least a full round of coffee and cinnamon buns for the team, which is our definition of rich here.
Book in a meeting with those members of your company that really walk the walk and extract their wisdom, a nugget at a time. You’d be surprised how many blog posts and social media updates you can pull from one interview, especially if your expert is a core personality within your business. This tactic works so well for many of our clients – check out some of our results!
BETTER TOGETHER
Get cosy with clusters
Start with a content strategy and develop personas to understand your target audience. The more you understand the audience, the better your content will speak to your customers. The more they engage, the more trust they build, and therefore, the more sales you will generate. This keeps every piece you write purposeful… there we go, reducing waste again.
By completing a content audit, as we suggested above, you’ll be in a great position to review what topics you tend to talk about. By pinning down some core areas of your expertise and matching them up with the appropriate audience, you can cluster your content around these hubs. This not only helps Google crawl your content logically and naturally, it helps users stick around longer by immediately providing them with the next thing in that topic they might want to read. Once you’ve decided on these categories and assigned the blogs you’re keeping to them, you’ll also start to see areas where you lack content, so you can add these to your content strategy.
what's next
Don't forget to spell it out.
Once they’ve read (and loved) the blog, you need to be clear on what you want visitors to do next.
- Connect with the author on LinkedIn
- Read more on this topic
- See this in play in our latest case study
- To discuss this with our team of experts, request a callback
- Want to learn more? Listen to/watch our podcast/webinar
- Subscribe for industry insights
Generating activity on your website makes search engines happy, which is a massive tick for your business’s online presence.
Have we convinced you on the importance of content marketing?
Do you need a hand getting started/more hours in the day to even consider it? We can help kickstart a content strategy or perform the content audit on your behalf so you can jump right into taking action to improve your blogging brilliance!
