How To Create A Content Plan For Your Business Blog

Killer content is a crucial part of a successful marketing strategy. It should help draw your target audience in and also convert them into leads. These leads can then be nurtured and move along your sales funnel, eventually turning into customers.

Blogging is an inbound marketing technique that helps attract your target buyer persona, when used in the right way. However, if you don't use blogging in the right way and don't target the right keywords or phrases, your business blog is set for certain failure. That is why creating a well thought out and well researched content plan for your business blog is imperative. In this blog article, I aim to discuss a few tips and steps you can take to crafting a stellar business blog content plan.

Know Your Target Customer

In order to really be the best, you have to be attracting the right types of people with your business blog. It's no good attracting any Tom, Dick or Harry as it's likely that they won't convert into a customer. You need to really hone in on who your ideal customer is, what they want and how you can become a magnet to attract them. First things first, you want to get into the mind-set of your ideal customer. What is it they are looking for? What are their challenges? All of this will help you create your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your perfect customer. They are absolutely paramount to the success of a content plan and business blog. Find out more about buyer personas in this blog article: Why Defining Your Buyer Persona Is Fundamental To Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

Drilling Into Your Ideal Customer's Pain Points

Okay, so now you know the importance of buyer personas and how they can make or break a successful inbound marketing campaign, you need to start drilling into their pain points. Before you come up with any article titles or even start to research keywords, you should brainstorm the main challenges and issues your customer's face. Your buyer persona research will help with this. If you were a customer looking for what you offer, what is it you really need? I'm going to use an old example here... If someone wants a picture hanging up on the wall, what is it they actually need? Think of this in the most basic way possible. They don't really need a drill to hang the picture up, all they need is a hole in the wall. This is how you need to think of your customers. Really get down to the nitty gritty of what they are actually trying to achieve. This will help you tap into their emotions, strike a chord with them and eventually will get you better quality traffic and leads.

Buyer Journey And The Offer

If you're okay with the previous two points and have got to grips with your perfect customer and their challenges, you are ready to start thinking about the buyer journey and your offer. Firstly, determine where your buyer persona sits in your sales funnel by the types of questions they will be asking and what they will be looking for. Are they in an awareness stage, consideration stage or decision stage? Your blog should primarily target buyers in an awareness stage and should aim to educate your visitors. If you don't currently have an offer that you can prompt people towards in your blog articles then you will need to create one. This could be something like a free guide, whitepaper or a checklist. Discover more about the buyer journey here: The Buyer Journey: Why Your Website Doesn't Work As Well As It Could

Creating The Content Plan

Once you have mapped out your persona, their journey and your offer, you are ready to start creating the actual content plan. I will go through some steps to creating this below...

Step 1: Questions

Find out the questions customers in your industry are asking. Look on industry forums, ask others in your industry and also ask your sales team. What questions do they get frequently asked. You can also use www.answerthepublic.com. On this website you can search for a keyword or phrase and it will bring up questions and terms people are actively searching for. This will help you come up with a starting base for some article ideas.

Step 2: Keyword Research

Once you have come up with some ideas you will need to start researching keywords. These need to be directly relevant to your article titles, and your main keywords should be included in your actual article titles. Long-tail keywords work really well with blog articles. They get less searches but are easier to rank for. Find out more about long tail keywords here - What Is A Long Tail Keyword And Why Should I Care

Step 3: Adding The Details To Your Content Plan

Okay, so once you have some great article titles and keywords to go with these that you want to rank for, you are ready to start adding everything to your content plan. A great content plan should include the following:

• Article title
• Target keywords for that title
• A short brief of what the article will be about
• Your target buyer persona
• The offer or call to action that will be included in the article
• The date it should be published
• The author of the article

Summary

Whilst you can outsource content marketing, creating a fantastic business content plan does take time if you want to do it right. You need to do plenty of research if you want to get the most out of it. However, if you take the different points from this article into account then you will be well on your way to crafting the perfect content plan for your business blog.