Growing brands with tighter marketing budgets often come to the same realization: that they need content marketing. Paid ads, be it on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, can come with a budget –but blogging is free. The only investment is your time and finger joint health, which is a fair trade considering consistent blogging practices can amplify site traffic exponentially. In fact, according to Hubspot, brands with a dedicated blogging platform see over 120% more leads.
However, a dedicated blog can’t gain traction without a plan. Blogging may be artful, but it’s chock-full of strategy. Copywriters need to identify audiences. Keywords need researching. Blogs need consistency. And with these blogging tips and tricks, your exposure-hungry brand can gain the online visibility it deserves.
Blogging Tips and Tricks for Growing Brands
Clearly Define Your Target Audience
Before putting fingers to keys, ensure you’re writing for the right audience. Blogging is all about the audience you’re catering to, whether you’re a CPG company selling snacks to consumers or a B2B CRM for general contractors. You need to ask yourself, “What would I want to read if I were in their shoes?”
For example–if you’re selling a CRM platform to general contractors, they may read your blog about “Cold Email Tips and Tricks for GCs,” but likely won’t dabble in a blog about “The History of the GC Industry.” One fulfills an active need, while the other is strictly informative, and not much help to your audience. It’s all about helping your reader with a specific issue in a genuinely valuable way.
Let Your Audience Guide SEO
Although it’s important not to write for the Google bots, blogging revolves around a solid SEO plan–and a solid SEO plan is dependent on an established target audience. Once you have your audience in mind, it’s time to flesh out the keywords with a healthy combination of volume and intent while keeping your current rank in mind.
If you’re already ranking on the first page of Google for a certain set of keywords, target those phrases that place you on the second, third, or fourth page. When looking at the volume, be sure it’s not so high that you’ll never be found and not so low that no one is searching for it. Most importantly, analyze the intent of your chosen phrases and develop long-tail keywords. A retailer might target the phrase “medium white prom dress,” for example, since it has higher intent than a simple search for “prom dress.”
Inform, Don’t Sell
Although your blog should have a unique boilerplate and CTA in its conclusion, the body isn’t meant to sell. Rather than focusing on selling your business with these blogs, prioritize delivering actionable blog content that answers your audience’s queries. Blogging isn’t about pushing your business down the throats of readers–it’s meant to inform, establish authority, and ultimately rise up the ranks of good ‘ol Google.
Informing your audience (rather than selling) also has added optimization value in the eyes of Google and other engines. Take Google’s new Helpful Content Update, for example; as of August 2022, Google is looking for more people-first content that’s designed for humans rather than for search engines. By delivering valuable blog content that truly helps visitors, you’ll get more keyword value from the search engine police.
Keep ‘Em Coming
Out of all of these blogging tips and tricks, this is probably the most important. A blog here and there won’t gain much traction with Google rankings, especially if each post targets a different keyword. This doesn’t mean you should be blasting three blogs a day to your audience–that might overwhelm them. Instead, develop weekly posting intervals and follow that schedule accordingly.
You may look at larger competitors and think, “Well, they don’t blog very often.” Well, they’re also established brands with existing domain authority. As a budding business with a growing online presence, targeting and hitting the right keywords on a consistent basis is your key to higher search rankings and click-through rates.
Here at KWSM, we boosted the web traffic of one of our legal clients from 6K visits in January to nearly 70K visits in August by using a 2x per week blogging cadence. Not too much, not too little.
Promote Your Content
Once you’ve targeted your audience, gathered your keywords, and written your content, it’s time to promote it. Without promotion, your blogs will simply sit on your site and wait to be read. Encourage visitors by sharing new posts on social media and sending newsletters to your contacts. Just be sure to target the right social media platform; an attorney is likely better served on LinkedIn than Facebook, for example, while most consumer brands would probably prefer to build a following on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Content Marketing is 62% Less Costly Than Traditional Marketing
Looking for a way to bolster your blogging efforts? Reach out to the digital marketing professionals at KWSM to bolster your online efforts.
Contact Us to book a free brainstorming session and strategize your path to increased leads, sales, and happy customers.
