Blogging has been and will be one of the strongest advocates of brands all over and especially when it comes to the online world. one knows in today’s trying times when things are insecure from the ‘ venturing out to buy something’ it is a difficult task and one thinks twice before doing so, due to the most obvious reasons today. So, how can one leverage the online blogging world?
It is a fact that all businesses big and small are taking advantage of technology today, in spreading the word about their businesses, and it is working, there is no doubt! But there is also the art of spreading the word online, one cannot simply start writing anything and imagine it would work, that is not true. One needs to look into the strategy as to how to prepare oneself in spreading the word of their respective businesses online.
Few things, I totally foresee for the remainder of the year and going into the future, which would only add value to all businesses online, mentioned below;
- Keyword targeting
- Think about the funnel
- Leverage thought-leadership
- Focus on long tail
- Executives buy-in
- Keyword strategy in content calenders
- Measure performance eventually
When we talk about keyword targeting, we simply have to focus on the intent of the end-user. what does the user at the other end would be typing in order to find your product, and then one needs to target those keywords out of the exercise. this is where the keywords come into use and are very relevant. hence, zero in on the intent of the user, always! I believe the better the exercise or rather homework in studying the target audience is, the better the targeting of the keyword would be eventually. so yeah, focus….intent, intent, intent.
The next one would be to focus on where in the funnel of the customer journey your blog fits best, which would give you a better strategy to write and capture the target audience. Customer-journey or customer-funnel or where in the natural flow of things, would your blog fit really? At every stage, where you consider your blog to fit right, would ideally have a little different approach, hence one will be able to write better and break the clutter hopefully when you target your audience exactly when the user needs you instead of imagining they would come to you, which is never the case.
Leveraging thought-leadership is simply asking the corporates or senior leaders to adapt to the process. It’s definitely not as easy as it sounds. Since majority of the leaderships are bound to their old ways, although the landscape might be changed for the better, due to the reasons today, yet, one needs to make sure that the process is accepted from the top-down. As the phrase suggests, it should be widely accepted from the top tier of leadership to the last man in the organization, only then will be exercise work smoothly without any hiccups.
In todays times, one also needs to focus on the long tail keywords instead of the usual short keywords. The difference is since long tail keywords have more specific words in total and in order to describe the product one is selling. Though the use is less possibly due to the keyword-strategy, which is when one is looking for keywords those are just one word. Having said that, the long tail keywords are ceratinly gaining more and more momentum in the digital space now and is also part of all good seo-practices today. It is also responsible for more conversions, and that is what counts at the end of the day, conversions online, sales, dollars.
Executive buy ins is an integral and important part of the process, when one has the support of the executive leadeship, it is obviously easier for the wheels to turn and sell your ideas, strategy to the business, in this case in point, blogs related to the businesses. There would be several elements in order to convince the executives such as having a clear business plan, have a holisitc view, connect culture to business strategy, draw from people-data, draw from research, show how you will measure success and lastly to leave space for questions in order to clear any lingering doubts.
Another important element is the intgration of ones keyword-strategy into the content-calenders. This is done in order to be simpy pro-active and tweak your content as and when needed. Apart from some other advantages of it, it also makes life easier at the strategy-level, in order to prepare content for the future, brain-storm content well ahead of time, be ready for all changes if and when the time comes if needed. Having integrated into the content-calenders, the executives and other stake holders can also have a view and share their feedback on the go.
Lastly, like mentioned earlier, one needs to also know how the blog-strategy is going for the brand, hence the use of the right metrics as per the brand, which could be different for different brands.
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