Creating content is a crucial aspect of any digital marketing strategy. A blog is one of the tools that is generally favored and is used by a large proportion of B2B companies.
However, it is not enough to write just for the sake of writing. If you want to make your efforts profitable, there are rules to follow and good practices to be respected. Here are five simple tricks that, even if you already knew, are always good to remember, to stay on track with the latest trends.
Who are you talking to?
Sometimes when we write, we lose sight of those who are addressed – or rather, those who should be addressed. Even worse, some blogs were launched “at random”, without real planning. But how do you prepare your readers and turn them into prospects if you don’t even really know who they are?
This is where a marketing study will make all the difference. Understanding the market and its clientele makes it possible to draw a better portrait of the average reader, or additional portraits. These personas will have the interests, challenges and problems for which you’ll be able to propose a solution.
If you are talking to CEOs but your readers are technicians or engineers, your efforts will be futile. On the other hand, if you write very technical content while the decision makers who need your services are more in the Finance department, they may get lost in your texts.
Knowing your audience is crucial.
What is your content worth?
Why should your readers spend precious minutes on your blog? You must provide them with value; relevant content that will teach them (or at least remind them) of something important in relation to their trade or industry.
Well-defined personas will be used to establish whether your content is valuable or not. Each persona will offer avenues to explore to find topics to deal with. Every persona “breeds” in their daily work and will be happy to spend a few minutes reading a note that could be useful to them.
Your post should help these personas do their job and accomplish tasks. Whether it’s simplifying their decision making, offering them a solution to a problem they face, or even getting them interested in how your business can improve their business. But you can’t write for the sake of writing.
You must provide value to the person who takes the time to read your content.
Content duplication, content duplication
You have a content calendar to respect. Time is running out, the next deadline is fast approaching. Oh, here’s an idea! Copy the text of an old case study and post it on the blog! Or better yet, copy content from some schmuck on the other side of the world — no one will notice, right?
… uh, please don’t?
Content duplication has a negative impact on your website’s performance. In addition to seeing your website penalized by Google in its ranking, user experience (UX) is also affected. Indeed, by reading the same words from one page to another, the visitor may be confused, lose interest, and then leave your site all-together.
You may have to deal with something that has already been discussed elsewhere. So, back to personas: adjust the words and lingo so you speak to them directly. Review the content, improve it and explain in other words to keep readers interested. Take advantage of this opportunity to get out of the more rigorous content of your site in order to adopt a less formal, warmer tone.
In some cases, you may have to copy the content of another page in full. It happens. But do it right and use the canonical tags properly.
If not, always keep in mind that a blog must be relevant. You should always be original and offer meaningful, timely content.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Of course, you need to take into consideration the SEO best practices when you’re writing your text.
I’m not talking about cheating by saturating search engines with keywords, tags, SEO, SEO optimization, SEM, Google, search engine optimization in Montreal…
Remember the ol’ days? Well, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Good riddance.
On the contrary, SEO best practices, when respected, generally make your text more coherent and more readable.
Besides the presence of keywords in your titles and in the URL of your page, other aspects improve your text appreciably. Short sentences, for example, the wise use of transition words or, the addition of subtitles to better tag your ideas. All these good practices offer a lot to your text and make it more enjoyable for the reader.
It’s for humans, above all, that we do SEO!
What’s your goal?
Once all these beautiful things are accomplished, once the link is clicked and your text is read, what does the reader do after?
The path of the reader must not stop at the end of your blog. Instead, indicate the way forward with calls to action (the famous “CTA” or Call To Action). The goal is, of course, to progress towards the sales funnel.
Offer to download a guide or a case study. Propose a subscription to your newsletter. Insert links to your products and services through text. You must seize this opportunity and perform a conversion; i.e. achieve a particular purpose with the reader.
What you want is to establish a first contact.
Therefore, I invite you to contact us if you would like to have more tips on content marketing, or to perform an analysis of your clientele!
