Blogging is also a powerful means of building an audience for your brand, and sustaining their interest over time – something every content effort should strive to achieve. Yet, considering just how powerful a role blogging can play in achieving key content marketing goals like engagement, lead generation, and a subscribed audience, it’s somewhat surprising to see such a gap between those who use it and users who rank it as their top factor of success. Improve your creative ideation process – If you are struggling to fill your content calendar with impactful topics, it may be helpful to revamp the way your team generates its content ideas. Need some tips to help you streamline your efforts and keep up with all the tasks involved in content creation? Learn more about the 30 habits of highly productive content teams, then check out our collection of time-saving content marketing tools. Use these tips to get your whole team involved in your content marketing efforts. Look for opportunities to take your blog readers down an unexpected path, approach topics from a unique angle, or explore special interests that your brand and its fans may have in common. Potential solutions: Highlight ways readers can get involved in your brand, and recognize them for their efforts – Don’t just say you are interested in your readers – prove that you value their participation and feedback by responding to their comments, creating opportunities for them to contribute their ideas, and rewarding them for helping you spread the word about your business. You aren’t making it clear you want readers to speak on your brand’s behalf – If you aren’t making it as easy as possible for readers to share your content, you are making it harder for your influence to spread. Promote your content – Social media and email marketing are both must-have techniques for spreading the word about the content you’ve published.
Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it last year. We’re publishing this update since blogging continues to be among the tactics content marketers consider most critical to their success.
Despite how much work is involved, blogging often is thought of as one of the most basic points of entry into the content marketing game: It’s a versatile technique with a lot of creative possibilities, options, and approaches; yet it doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise or equipment to produce and maintain.
Blogging is also a powerful means of building an audience for your brand, and sustaining their interest over time – something every content effort should strive to achieve. Not to mention it can help fuel your other content marketing channels, since blog posts are easily adapted for use on social media or in email newsletters.
Those are just a few of the likely reasons why 80% of B2B marketers in our 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends study include blogging as part of their content program, with other sectors (such as B2C and nonprofit) reporting similarly high usage rates. Our research also found that blogging is consistently among the top tactics its users consider to be most critical to their content marketing success.
Yet, considering just how powerful a role blogging can play in achieving key content marketing goals like engagement, lead generation, and a subscribed audience, it’s somewhat surprising to see such a gap between those who use it and users who rank it as their top factor of success.
What might be holding businesses back from getting more benefits out of their blogging efforts? For starters, our B2B research found that more than half (59%) of content marketers may lack a clear idea of what content marketing success looks like for their organization. It may seem backward, but many businesses begin blogging before they outline the goals to which they want their efforts to contribute or before they even understand how to gauge its performance.
There are also plenty of less obvious obstacles your blog content needs to overcome if your efforts are going to truly achieve the best outcomes from your efforts. If you aren’t feeling effective with your blog, chances are you are struggling with at least one of the following issues, and might benefit from the tips and examples below:
Problem 1: You aren’t publishing on a consistent schedule
Great blog content should be like an eagerly anticipated gift to your readers – they look forward to every new delivery and are happy to visit your site to retrieve your content as soon as it is available. But what happens when they arrive and the gift they were expecting hasn’t shown up? If you can’t keep the content engines churning or fail to deliver on the expectations you set with your blog, those readers will walk away disappointed – and may think twice about returning.
Warning signs: Consistency issues typically result from one of these two underlying problems:
- Lack of editorial infrastructure – You haven’t set a workable schedule for creating and publishing your content or established the necessary workflow that would reliably govern your process.
- Lack of resources – You need more writers or more creative ideas; or you are running into productivity problems that are keeping your team from being able to bring your ideas to fruition.
Potential solutions:
- Develop an editorial calendar – Establishing a schedule of topics you will cover and the timeline for doing so can help you set realistic expectations and keep your content creation in line with your marketing goals. These editorial calendar essentials will help get you started.
- Improve your creative ideation process – If you are struggling to fill your content calendar with impactful topics, it may be helpful to revamp the way your team generates its content ideas. You can also try some helpful tools that can be used to spark content creation.
- Enhance your productivity – With so much to do, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated as the to-do list grows ever longer. Need some tips to help you streamline your efforts and keep up with all the tasks involved in content creation? Learn more about the 30 habits of highly productive content teams, then check out our collection of time-saving content marketing tools. You can also follow our complete guide to becoming a content marketing productivity master.
- Enlist the help of your team members for content creation – Your executives, team members, and even colleagues outside of the marketing department can be motivated to help increase your content coffers. Use these tips to get your whole team involved in your content marketing efforts.
Best practice example: Moz’s Whiteboard Friday
If consistency is key, Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin certainly knows how to unlock the doors of audience engagement. Whiteboard Friday blog posts tackle the SEO questions (both large and small) that marketers have, and do so in a creative and visually appealing way – week after week, without fail.
Problem 2: Your blog content isn’t unique or distinct
For your content to stand out among the competition, it needs to offer distinctive value – providing information your readers can’t get anywhere else, serving a segment of your audience no one else is addressing, finding a unique angle for content in your business niche, or delivering on promises your brand is uniquely qualified to make.
Warning signs: If you aren’t giving your audience a compelling reason to choose your content over everything else they could be spending time with, your blog will never reach its full marketing potential. Here are some sure signs your content is going to fade into the background:
- You don’t know what makes your brand special – You need to identify the specific ways your business is different than everyone else’s before you can create content that communicates with a signature tone, voice, or style.
- You are targeting too broad an audience – As CMI founder Joe Pulizzi often says, if your content is meant for everybody, it won’t benefit anybody.
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