by Jeff GrayNot Sure What Your Business Should Blog About? Ask These 4 Questions.
You’ve hopefully decided that 2022 is the year your business jumps into blogging. It’s a low-cost content marketing strategy that can drive real results for your company, including improvement in lead generation, customer retention and search rankings.
Great… but what should your business blog about? For teams that may not have experienced content marketers, coming up with blog topics can be trickier than you think. Next time you gather your marketing team or agency, use these four questions to spark ideas.
1. What do we want to accomplish with this blog piece?
Ultimately, the objective of your blog strategy is to drive business outcomes; you’re not blogging for the sake of creative expression (well, at least not primarily). So don’t let the tail wag the dog: start by identifying specific objectives, then think of blog content that can support them.
Maybe you need to drive registrations for an upcoming webinar. A blog post introducing key concepts of the presentation could be followed by a CTA to register for the webinar. Maybe your objective is less specific, like trying to drive brand awareness on LinkedIn. Just be sure to set specific KPIs you can use to measure success, like impressions or clicks.
By identifying a specific objective up front, your team can ensure each blog post is optimized to deliver results.
2. What problem can we help our audience solve?
Your audience doesn’t want to read about how great your company or product is. Their interest in your brand extends only as far as their interest in how your brand helps them.
Your content team shouldn’t be writing long-form ads. Instead, each of your blog posts should help your audience solve a specific problem they face. Maybe you detail how to perform an essential business task (like blogging!); maybe you explore the impact of a developing industry trend; maybe you describe how your company’s recent funding round will improve the customer experience.
Start by brainstorming the types of problems your business solves for customers; great blog topic ideas will flow from there.
3. What does the sales team think?
Nobody knows your customers and the problems they face better than your sales team. So shouldn’t they have a role in developing content to engage those customers?
Get your marketing and sales teams on a call and have your sales folks review your buyer personas and the typical paths to purchase. What challenges do these individuals and their businesses face? How does your company solve the challenge and how can you best communicate your solution?
Then have both teams brainstorm blog topics that address specific problems faced by potential customers. Discuss how that content can be crafted and delivered in a way that moves leads along the sales path.
This process of account-based marketing, or ABM, creates more efficient, targeted campaigns and will increase ROI.
What search terms do we want to rank for?
Blog content is a great way to improve search rankings for your company website… but only if you take a strategic approach.
Have your marketing team pull the list of search terms your business is trying to rank for, then use it to brainstorm blog topic ideas. But don’t just turn these into product or service descriptions; go back to point 2 and think about the problem facing someone searching for that term. Then create blog content that helps them solve it.
If you’re offering real value, users will stick around to read the blog, boosting your website’s engagement metrics and signifying to search engines that your business is an authority on that subject. That will, in turn, improve your website’s SEO and drive more potential customers to your site.
Still need help developing a blog content strategy? Contact a content marketing pro at Studios.