Charlotte McCormac
Recently, we to spoke a company that had tried content marketing and had given up after a couple of months. They’d written a handful of blog posts, but once the blog posts were live, nothing happened.
They didn’t gain any leads and their traffic barely increased. The company concluded that no-one was interested in reading their blog posts.
But questions exist around every topic. Humans have an innate curiosity; they want to know why, and then, they want to know how.
If your blogging strategy isn’t consistent and optimised to answer your prospects’ questions, it might seem that no-one’s interested in reading your content. But, if you blog for your construction market, there’s always ways to bring traffic to your building products website, attract leads and maximise sales.
Blogging, when done right, can work for everyone.
Insynth explained to the company that a few unconnected blog posts aren’t enough. To drive results, they need to treat construction blogging like growing an orchard. Just as trees in an orchard need consistent nurturing to be healthy, blog content needs to be gradually built up to drive traffic.
Here’s how you can grow blogging as part of your construction content marketing strategy to reap the fruits of your labour.
Core Strategy
Your blogging strategy can’t be instantly successful; blogging is a gradual process. It requires perseverance and time. The more you update your construction blog, the more authoritative it will become. Blogging should become core to your construction content marketing strategy.
Think of each blog post as a tree in your orchard. Plant a couple, then a couple more. As your blog posts grow, you’ll find that they link together with a well-rounded context and appeal to a wider range of search enquiries.
Branching Out Your Topic Clusters
It’s important to plan your content strategically and thematically. Just as you wouldn’t plant trees in your orchard randomly and without prior planning, you shouldn’t blog on a whim.
It’s far less helpful to write sporadic blog posts than it is to research your audience in depth to identify the topics that they are searching for online. These are the topics that you should blog about.
The goal is to be more helpful and informative than any other company in your market. Lots of building product companies only blog about their products and announcements. All too often, educational or informative content is overlooked. But this is the kind of content that people are looking for.
For every topic that you identify, list all the questions that your ideal customers might want answers to. For each question, write a blog post that answers it comprehensively.
When you focus on one topic at a time, you can create detailed topic clusters and provide informative, structured information for your readers. These should all tie in to one pillar post that’s situated at the core of your campaign.
Include a contents page to make navigation as easy as possible and improve user-friendliness.
Once completed, review all blog posts in each topic cluster from a link-building perspective, adding hyperlinks between pages to structure your content into a web of informative substance.
Avoid Blogging Tree-son
Relevancy is a vital part of blogging. You wouldn’t grow a banana tree in an apple orchard. Researching your market interests is pivotal if you want your blog posts to answer the questions that are searched online.
It’s surprising that so many companies dive straight into blogging without researching their construction market. How can you write if you don’t know who you’re writing to and what you should be writing about?
A good place to start with prospect research is buyer personas. Create semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and data about your existing prospects. The more information you include, the more specific and realistic your buyer personas will be. Consider including demographics, customer trends, motivations, goals and lifestyle choices.
Once you have completed your buyer personas, keep them in mind when writing your blog content. What would they want to gain from each blog post? Have you answered their questions?
Your buyer personas are the seeds of your orchard blog posts. Don’t under-estimate their importance. Your blogs will wither without them.
Treet Your Blog Posts Write
Once you’ve planted your seeds, you can’t just leave your blog posts to grow alone. Like growing an orchard, blogging requires constant nurturing.
One of the most important ways to nurture your blog posts is through SEO changes, often based on Google algorithm updates. For example, Google used to crawl blog content for keywords, ranking based on individual words in the content. Now, Google ranks content for its overall meaning and how well it meets search enquires.
SEO and blogging can’t be considered as separate entities; they need to be integrated for construction blogging success.
Juicing Your Content
Another way to nurture your content is to regularly audit blog posts to analyse what they need to keep thriving. This is the equivalent to watering your plants to aid growth in your orchard.
During your audits, you’ll find places in your construction blog posts to add new context. Perhaps some recent industry news shines a new light on a topic that you discussed six months ago. You may also find a blog post with potential for re-purposing. Perhaps it would be effective re-purposed as a video or case study.
Fruitful Keywords
Your trees wouldn’t grow without the right soil and the right climate, just as your construction blog posts won’t without the right keywords. The tallest, strongest trees have been grown in the best conditions. It’s the same with blogging.
Before you start writing, use a tool like SEMRush to identify the keywords that you would like to rank for. When you grow your blog posts around these keywords, they’ll be grounded for strong Google rankings and your content will be noticed by the right people.
Need Help Planting Ideas?
Blogging is a commitment that takes time and persistence. Insynth recognise that many building product companies don’t have the time or resources for a consistent, detailed blogging schedule.
If you need help with your construction blogging strategy, sign up to speak to a blogging expert. Insynth can work with you to research, plan and create as much or as little content as you require.
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About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing consultancy based in Shifnal in the West Midlands. Insynth employ the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to help building product manufacturers grow their businesses by aggressively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.