Developing a blog for your business is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase organic traffic and build trust amongst your audience.
When adopted alongside a holistic Inbound Marketing approach, you’ll be on track to increasing your sales, reaching new markets and establishing your building product brand as a leading authority within the space.
As with any new approach, though, a certain degree of strategy and planning must take place in order to truly reap the rewards highlighted above. Cut corners and you stand to waste a lot of valuable time and resources.
In this post, we identify ten actionable steps for a successful (and rewarding) blogging campaign for your building product business.
Read on…
Like your website, your blog is not for you. It’s not a chance to shamelessly promote or push your brand. A blog is there to provide a useful resource to any specifier carrying out product research.
This means that you should have an acute understanding of your target audience. If you have multiple audience segments who work at different stages of the supply chain or project status, we recommend targeting only one within your blogging campaign. It’s much better to focus on one objective and tackle it well than only grazing the surface of multiple different segments.
We actively encourage you to truly get to know your audience. Talk to them. Interview them. Find out about what they like and what keeps them up at night.
Talk to someone who chose your competitor’s product over yours. What compelled them to make that decision?
Carrying out Buyer Persona research is key to writing meaningful, helpful and authoritative copy.
These are the people that will regularly engage with target audience members. They will be dealing with technical queries and, dare I say it, complaints on a daily basis (hopefully not complaints).
Establish a list of the common queries your front facing team members get asked and jot them down – they’ll come in handy when it comes to curating your blog titles.
Possibly one of the most crucial parts of the process, keyword research will identify what keywords people are using to find solutions like the one you provide.
Once you have identified your target keyword, this should be used as a focal point within all of your blog posts.
Selecting the right target keyword is key. One that receives tens of thousands of searches a month will be much harder to rank for when compared to a keyword that receives less than five hundred searches a month.
Keyword research is best done with specific software such as SEMRush. Without this investment, you’ll find it more challenging to identify keywords to target and the key metrics to base your decisions on.
Flitting from one topic to the next is like spinning plates, and we know the outcome there…
Focussing on one topic will help Google recognise you as a leading authority within that particular space. Topics could include:
- LST Radiators in Primary Schools
- Fire doors in Apartment Buildings
- Data Centre Security Fencing
With your keyword research in place and your technical queries jotted down (from step two), you should now begin curating your blog titles. From an SEO perspective, each blog title should contain your target keyword(s).
But, at the same time, your titles should be engaging enough for the reader to want to click through to your post. Examples include:
- 10 things you’re probably missing….
- 6 Tips for…
- How to…
- Factors Affecting…
- X things to consider…
For each topic, we recommend up to twelve blog posts.
Your lead magnet could be either an eBook, whitepaper, technical guide or even a CPD.
It should relate to the topic you’ve been blogging about.
This content offer should be made available on your website, yet, gated behind a landing page and form to ensure you gain valuable contact information with which your sales team can follow up.
By now, you will have your plan in place. You will have carried out your keyword research, established your topic and curated your blog titles.
Now it’s time to put pen to paper… or fingers to keyboard.
When it comes to blogs, the more posts you write, the faster your results will be. We recommend blogging at least once a week. Try to reserve around three hours for each blog post.
Blogs, typically, should be anything from 500 to 1500 words. The lengthier the word count, the better from an SEO perspective.
Each week, when you write and publish your blog post, you should also look to promote it on social media platforms. LinkedIn is a great place for networking, and promoting your blog posts each week will ensure a steady stream of engagement amongst your connections and prospects.
Your blog posts could also be promoted via email marketing. A monthly newsletter with all your blogs, a case study and a link to your eBook will make for an extremely useful resource for your contacts list to take advantage of.
With any marketing campaign, measuring your efforts against key metrics will help you to understand its success.
Google Analytics is perhaps the best tool to obtain the data needed to measure the success of your blogging. Pay close attention to:
Armed with your blog’s performance data, you have a couple of options:
It could be that you need to reapproach your keyword research, or spend time writing more blog titles on a particular topic. Try not to get to disheartened by this. Each blogging campaign you carry out will get better and better.
Alternatively, you may wish to tackle a new topic or a new audience segment. In this case, you’ll need to take everything you’ve learnt in the previous campaign and start the process again.
Establishing a blogging strategy isn’t without its challenges. It takes time, effort and skill. If you’d like any support with any of the points discussed in this post, don’t hesitate to speak to an expert today.
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.
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