Writing blogs without a strategy in place is like running ten miles without training—you’re going to crash and burn… Or worse, waste your time because those five blogs you just wrote? They aren’t getting views and they aren’t generating leads.
If all you’re focused on are the tactics (keywords, pictures, and content) instead of building a solid strategy, that would be one of the top reasons you aren’t generating consistent or qualified sales leads.
But why is strategy so important to the success of your blog? Let’s list the top ten reasons to give you a better idea:
1). Build Buyer Personas: This is the most important step when beginning a new internet marketing strategy. You need to ask yourself who your target audience is and how you can speak to them through inbound and outbound marketing tactics. After all, how are you supposed to market to them if you don't have an idea of who you're speaking to? Research their challenges, pain points, interests, where they spend their time (on and offline), and where they are in the buyer's journey (awareness, consideration, or decision). Clearly defining your strategy and goals for each buyer persona will help you craft more succinct campaigns, as well as remarkable content that these personas will willingly engage.
2). Set Smart Goals: That's all well and good, but how do you set your goals? Ask yourself what you want to see happen through your efforts. Are you looking to build a stronger online presence? Maybe you're looking to become an industry thought leader on a particular topic or challenge? Or perhaps, you're just looking for a way to double your customer base? Each and every campaign needs to have SMART goals—goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
Determining what’s important to your buyer persona will help you decide the number of content campaigns you should focus your marketing efforts on. Once you really define your buyer personas, set goals to determine how you and when you will reach those milestones.
3). Create Content Campaign: Once goals are set in place, creating campaigns is the next important item for strategy. When establishing a content campaign, it's important to look at the challenges your buyer personas face on a daily basis. That way, you can be sure you're creating content that resonates with your target audience. Remember to:
- Research your audience and ensure your content is relevant
- Keep the majority of your content educational and focused on your persona
- Share anything, from articles to infographics, that will get your buyer persona to engage
- Continue to measure your results so you have a clear understanding of what's working and what isn't
4). Use the Right Design: The designs included in your strategy MUST match the design of your brand. You need engagers to make instant connections between the content on the page and your brand. If your white papers are boring and don't offer incentives to a). engage with the brand further, or b). provide answers and solutions, you aren't creating a positive experience for your customers. The content is important, but following that up with quality design is also vital to the success of your strategy.
5). Placement: How do you represent your buyer persona on your website? Have you designed an experience for them, or have you just designed a website? Placement is key to strategy. Defining the path of your buyer persona’s journey is important for placing offers and other important pieces of content on your website. You just need to know where your visitors are engaging the most in order to take advantage of their traffic with CTAs.
6). Channels: When you have written and designed amazing content and blogs to help you become a strong market leader for each campaign, without defining how you are going to reach your buyer personas in your strategy, you are writing and designing that content FOR NOTHING. Even if the placement of your website for this content is kick-ass, if you aren’t pulling people to your website from various channels, they will never come. Sure SEO is awesome, but your results are minimal if you are just focusing on optimization. There is just too much content to compete with to really maximize your SEO results. You must find other means to reach your audience. In order to do this, you must know what channels your buyer personas hang out.
7). Process: You have great content, you have a great design, you have your buyer personas defined – so how is your marketing process set up? Do you have a clear path from awareness stage through decision stage? What piece of content comes first, what blogs should be posted when? Sometimes, businesses get caught up in the process, instead of focusing on the quality and relevance of the content their producing.
8). Schedule: Once you nailed down the process, knowing when things are posting to your website and channels is most important in staying organized. Schedules also help your marketing department stay on top of things.
9). Test and Analyze: Every call-to-action button, landing page, email, blog post should be tested. If the numbers aren’t what you expected, change headers, subject lines, design to meet the wants and needs of your visitors. You would be surprised at what a color change of button could do to the conversions. Day by day, week by week, month by month, review your campaigns views, clicks, and conversion numbers. This will help in determining what your strategy will be for your next campaign
10). Align Marketing with Sales: You can add the absolute best marketing strategy to your business, but you cannot forget to align your marketing efforts with your sales. Handing over qualified sales leads to a sales team that doesn’t know how to effectively sell to buyer personas who have already gone through an extensive marketing funnel will be deferential to those leads. The “hard sell” is not necessary if your marketing strategy is working perfectly. In fact, it will be the death of your business.
All in all...
There is a lot that goes into creating a successful marketing strategy. There are many hours spent in creating killer strategies for each campaign and it doesn’t stop there. Once the strategy is laid out, you have to write the content, design the content, map out the offer buttons on the website and write content to promote those offers.
You then have to test, analyze and test again. You have to be prepared to make consistent changes within each campaign to maximize results. The size of your marketing department determines how many hours you can give to marketing strategies, unless you outsource these efforts to a marketing agency. This is especially helpful to those businesses that do not have a full-service marketing department.