What’s the point of blogging?

Luckily you for you, I'm not here to pose any philosophical questions, just talking about using blogging in a content marketing strategy. Learn about planning and reaching more people with your content.

What’s the point of blogging? A guide to content marketing

Content marketing

Luckily you for you, I’m not here to pose any philosophical questions. I won’t be musing about the futility of writing stuff that (maybe) nobody will read. Oh, what’s the point of it all?!! If a blog post falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it exist at all?

I don’t know the answer to this, but I DO know the answer to the point of blogging within a content marketing strategy.

Planning a content marketing strategy

This generally takes the following shape, this is true for marketing as well as your life in general. This is the blog post that keeps on giving.

1.     What do you want to achieve?

2.      Where are you with your current efforts?

3.      What can you do to fill the gaping chasm between the two?

Creating a marketing strategy has been covered in another one of my blog posts, so I’ll skip to the important part – some tools to close the gap between what you have and what you want.

As part of this gap-closing, you’ll need to see where the gaps are in your current content marketing and find out where you audience is.

Finding out where your audience is – this is your number one job. There’s no point in planning a great strategy around audience engagement on Instagram, if your audience is mainly on Twitter. This is especially true for anyone with a niche audience.

What does your current content look like?

Put your current content into one of the following four categories, depending on what it sets out to achieve: Reach, interact, convert, engage.

Reach more people with digital marketing

What content do you have that builds awareness of your brand on other sites or offline? This content should be driving people to your website.

Check your analytics to see where traffic to your website is coming from. Is social media a good source, or maybe a guest blog post from a related site?

Another way of looking at it might be increasing your reach with the content already on your website – for example shareable content (blog posts, videos – include social buttons to make sharing easier).

If this is one of the areas that you could do better on, try one of the following ‘reach’ content strategies:

·        Digital and offline adverts (for example, AdWords)

·        Blog posts

·        Videos

·        Newsletters

·        News stories

·        Display ads

·        Social ads

Interact with your audience

What content do you have that engages with your audience on your website? Things that keep that website visitor browsing your website and not clicking away?

Clicking away is what is known as ‘bounce rate’, and should be easy to find in your website analytics. A high bounce rate means that lots of your website visitors have come to your website and clicked away immediately.

Whether the visitor is dwelling on your website because they are enthralled with your every utterance, or whether it is because they are furiously clicking on every page because they can’t find what they are looking for – well, that’s for you to determine. 

If you have a particularly low bounce rate (ie visitors don’t click off your website immediately) and high page visitor count, you can pat yourself on your back and beam in the knowledge your web visitor has immediately found exactly what they are looking for and is enjoying your content.

If not, you could try some of these strategies to lower the bounce and get some interaction:

·         Riveting web content

·         Case studies

·         Email marketing (GDPR rules apply)

·         Social pages

Convert website visitors

How are you achieving conversion? What does that mean to you? Purchasing from your website, downloading something or filling in a contact form?

Either way, most websites have a purpose and a ‘call to action’. Make sure you make it easy for your website visitor to complete that action:

·         Create a button for donations, sharing or signing up – and include that button where appropriate

·         Build trust with testimonials

·         Create a rapport with email marketing (please adhere to GDPR rules with this)

Engage with your audience

Once you have built awareness of your brand, attracted visitors and encouraged an action of some sort, now is the time to engage with them to encourage a longer-term relationship (repeat business for example).

If this is the part that you feel is lacking in your current planning, try some of the following:

·         Maintain a dialogue within some of the established online communities. Where are your audience? That’s where you should be, whether it’s Instagram, Twitter and/or Facebook.

·         Keep your engaged visitors up-to-date with email marketing and/or a newsletter

Once you have considered all of this, as part of your wider marketing strategy, you need to consider how to measure all of your new-found success.

You can’t improve on what you can’t measure.