Welcome to Day 3 of the Crafting Your Content Marketing Strategy Challenge!
While blogging is an important type of content used in content marketing, there is a lot of difference between blogging just for the sake of putting something up that you want to share and putting up something with a specific goal and audience in mind for marketing purposes. One is just content for your own pleasure, and one is content with a specific purpose that is valuable to your audience and profitable for you.
When you engage in content marketing, you know the point or goal of every single piece of content that you create, publish, and distribute – including your blog posts – before you even start thinking about the title, keywords, and content subject matter.
Blog posts are best when used to target your ideal customers who are still in the awareness stage of their buying journey. They just now realized or are becoming aware that they even have a problem, and they need educational and informative content to help them learn about their problem and, eventually, the solutions that they can access.
Choosing Your Blog Post Content
When creating blogs for the purpose of awareness, it’s essential that you ensure these posts are highly targeted and include the right terms for search engine optimization purposes. You’ll want to employ both on-page and off-page SEO and know where to distribute the posts to ensure you get the most traffic to these types of educational, informative, and non-sales focused blog posts.
The best way to determine what type of blog posts to write is to set a goal for the post, understand where the targeted audience member is in their buying journey, know your products, services, and mission like the back of your hand, and work from there on the content. Once you create the content, you’ll also need to use the information you know about your audience to distribute it because simply publishing it on your blog is not enough. For the content to be effective, you must promote it as if it’s your best product ever.
It will help you in creating this type of blogging content for content marketing if you get to know your audience better by developing audience personas based on the stage they are in their buying journey or buying cycle. Once you identify the people who are in this stage, you can start creating potential titles based on the goals you’ve set for the content.
Check out this sample
For example, let’s say that you’re a personal chef and you want to sell your services. You wouldn’t necessarily create a blog post to sell these services directly. Instead, you would bring awareness to the problem. Not having a family dinner is the problem you’ve identified for your audience, likely due to lack of time, not knowing how to cook, or not understanding its importance.
If you want to bring awareness to the fact that most families don’t eat dinner together anymore and the benefits of bringing the family dinner time back, you might write some posts that provide statistics about the benefits of eating dinner together each night.
The title might be something like:
Sample #1: How to Cook a Family Dinner in 30 Minutes
This post seems strange since you are selling your services, but the truth is, you can demonstrate things to the audience about cooking, buying groceries, meal planning, and other aspects even if you’re selling the service. Not everyone who learns how to do it themselves wants to do it themselves.
Sample #2: 7 Scientific Benefits of Family Dinners
This post can point out why families need to eat together. A quick search on the net showed that psychological research says that families who eat together are happier, the kids do better in school, and they are less likely to have serious financial problems. This post will help anyone who is not convinced they need family dinners realize that they do.
Sample #3: Reasons Every Family Should (and Can Afford) to Hire a Professional Personal Chef
This one is a lot more direct, but a post like that on occasion is fine even in the awareness stage. Basically, you’ll want to explain what a personal chef is, how a regular family can afford it (maybe just weekly, for example), and other reasons that are for their benefit and value.
As you see, each of these posts has a goal to educate and inform the ideal audience and bring awareness to the problems and the solutions. When you can ensure a post has a targeted audience and a reason for existing while providing value to the consumer, you’ll succeed in content marketing.
Please leave any comments or questions below.
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