The Long Term Impact of a Coordinated Content Marketing Strategy
The most successful blogs didn’t happen by accident. How could they? Their design, format, topics, and keywords are all carefully honed to attract their ideal customer (or anyone who might eventually become their perfect customer).
Coordination doesn’t just magically happen when you produce content. Instead, you need to have a clear idea from the start, and every step along the way, what you’re writing, who you’re writing it for, and why.
Coordinated content strategies drive growth
The ultimate goal of any blog is to drive growth. Whether that's for a business, a community, or otherwise. Even a personal blog is published into the void of the internet so that someone might read it.
How do those blog writers actually make growth happen? Let’s look at five examples of ways that a coordinated content marketing strategy can help your blog be successful.
1. Recognition from search engines
This list would be incomplete and (to be honest) wrong if search engine optimization wasn’t the most important reason for a coordinated content strategy.
By planning out what and why you write what you write, the response from search engines will be far more beneficial than if the content is written and posted without planning. Better keyword planning, internal linking etc., all help ensure that search engines view your content as valuable.
2. Pre-qualified traffic
Your web content should target the kinds of visitors your business wants as customers.
Of course, writing spur-of-the-moment, reactionary content based on current news or trends can be valuable, but having that be your only content strategy will leave visitors confused. It’s like using only click-bait style titles and meta descriptions to try and get visitors — you’ll get the visitors, but without real value, there is no point in them staying. The result will be sporadic traffic spikes with very high bounce rates, which won’t do anything for your business.
With a content strategy, on the other hand, your entire process is designed around creating content that is appealing to your ideal customer profile. That can be the marketing funnel content's top, middle, or bottom. In any case, the whole point is that the visitors who make it to your site (and convert to leads) are coming to you pre-qualified.
It’s “easy” to just get more traffic. It is entirely more complicated and takes real content strategy to get traffic that is going to have any intention of becoming a customer. At the very least, it’s hard enough to get them to join your community — aka your blog, social media, etc.
3. Topic clusters to increase engagement
When the content on your site is produced strategically you also have the added benefit of having related content that is more easily linked to each new piece. No blog becomes an island, making it much easier for you to build those strategic keyword clusters for SEO. Then userscano more organically discover other content you’ve created that they would find interesting.
This can apply to top-level content topics that your blog speaks about — aka your niche — or can be much more granular sub-topics that you want to do targeted keyword optimization for. In either case, having other blogs like it that you can either link to inline directly in your blog body or have a separate call to action to direct readers to read more, it will increase the likelihood that they stick around.
A click on your other content means they aren’t bouncing and further helps qualify them as potential customers if your content is specific to your business.
4. Easier to identify areas of expertise
Closely connected to increased engagement is the fact that when new visitors land on your site from search engine results, having coordinated your content topics will help them understand what kind of content you provide. The value they can get by joining your newsletter or social media community will be much more apparent when they can see the consistent topics that your blog covers.
Without an easy-to-identify area of expertise, visitors will be at a loss about whether to have any further interest in your business if it isn’t clear that you write content on topics they are interested in. Bouncing around without a strategic plan will confuse audiences — and that is the last thing you want.
5. Subject expert writers
When your content is all tied together — the result of having a coordinated content strategy, it’s going to be unfathomably simpler to find your next content writer. Whether you’re hiring a fractional marketer or in-house, when you know exactly what kind of content you need to write, it will make things easier in two ways.
First, you can filter out all writers who do not write for your niche topics. If your blog is going to focus on, say, medical device technological breakthroughs for the next six months, then you only need to look for writers who have experience writing about healthcare topics.
Secondly, whoever you bring on board will be able to ramp up much more quickly. They will be able to not only see the strategy laid out, but there will be a limited number of topics for them to get up to speed on so they can write with authority as well. If your blog is all over the place, it will be impossible for newly onboarded writers to inject confidence and leadership into the content because your blog simply won’t have that to draw from.
The coordinated content strategy TL;DR
A quick look around the internet will show you that a coordinated content strategy is essential for building a successful blog. Writing valuable content involves having a clear idea of what to write, who to write it for, and why — in essence, a content strategy.
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