How to Plan Your Blog Content Strategy in 6 Easy Steps

Chances are, you’re reading this blog post because you understand the importance of blogging for increasing organic search traffic to your website.

You are here because you find yourself in a situation where you are uncertain about the topic: What should I write about?

Given that over 2.5 billion blogs are published annually, it seems highly implausible for any new blog post to surpass the existing ones in terms of rank.

With an overwhelming amount of blog content available, it becomes a challenging endeavor to establish your distinctive presence.

Let’s delve into this article where we have comprehensively laid out effective ways to plan your blog content from beginning to end.

The Elements of a Blog Content Strategy

A blog content strategy establishes a connection between your blog and the company’s objectives and merchandise. It ensures that your blog content is purposeful and cohesive, rather than relying on sporadic inspiration from your team. However, this does not imply that it needs to be intricate – in fact, a robust blog content strategy is built upon only three components.

Your audience, and the problems they’re looking to solve
Your product, and how it solves those problems
Your content, and how it connects problems to solutions

Your Audience and Their Problems

To determine your target audience, begin by considering the desired outcome they seek to accomplish and the obstacles preventing them from reaching it. Ask yourself:

Who are our current best customers (for example, those with highest spend, lowest support needs, and/or have been with you for a long time)?
What qualities do our best customers share?
What made them search for a solution like our product or service?
What do these customers gain by choosing us instead of our competitors (or doing nothing)?

Use this statement to define your marketing persona: [Your company] produces blog content specifically designed to engage [target audience] in order to help them [desired outcome] more effectively.

Your Product as a Solution

When you have a deep understanding of your target audience and how your product aligns with their needs and challenges, whether it is a software subscription, a physical product, a service you provide, a digital product, or a combination of these, your offering becomes the solution to their pain points. By recognizing the correlation between your product and your target audience’s struggles, you are able to effectively position and market your product to address their specific needs and make a positive impact on their lives and/or work.

Launch and update products and features they need and will actually use
Describe and position your product through marketing and sales in a way your audience can understand and relate to

Your Content and Its Role to Connect Problems to Solutions

Instead of just focusing on yourself and your products, it is important for your blog to provide content that addresses your audience’s inquiries and helps them find a solution. Remember that your target audience may not be prepared to make a purchase, and they may not even be aware of the specific problem they are facing. Therefore, it is crucial for your blog to cover the entire customer journey, rather than solely promoting yourself and your products.

Awareness (top of the funnel, or TOFU): your audience is learning about the problem they’re experiencing
Evaluation (middle of the funnel, or MOFU): your audience is evaluating types of solutions for their problem
Decision (bottom of the funnel, or BOFU): your audience is ready to choose a specific product or service to solve their problem

If your blog content does not educate and empower potential customers in their journey towards finding a solution, your competitors will do so, as the path from awareness to decision is often non-linear.

The Tools of the Trade

You don’t need a lengthy 50-page document for your blog content strategy that no one will bother to read. On the contrary, it should be a straightforward and concise action plan that you and your team can depend on. To achieve this, you only require three basic tools.

An editorial calendar
A content idea backlog
A blog content strategy template

1. Your Editorial Calendar

What is the upcoming scheduled blog post? What is the designated format? Who is responsible for writing, editing, approving, and publishing it? How does it align with the company’s ongoing marketing efforts? Various options such as printed calendars, Excel spreadsheets, and specialized apps are available for your editorial calendar. Ensure that your selection is suitable for your requirements in terms of collaboration, workflows, automation, and adaptability.

2. Your Content Idea Backlog

Afterward, it is necessary to have a centralized location where all content ideas can be stored, ensuring accessibility for all members of your team. This will serve as the repository for content ideas generated during brainstorming sessions as well as any other ideas that may arise subsequently, including those from:

A customer email
A sales conversation
Social media listening
Questions from your target audience on Reddit, Quora, etc.
Audience surveys

3. Your Blog Content Strategy Template

To fill your editorial calendar and your idea backlog, you need a simple blog content strategy document. It should outline:

Your target audience and its key characteristics
A list of top problems your audience faces
Your solutions for those problems (products, services, and/or features)
Your content core
Your blog categories
Your top keywords, with volume and difficulty

How to Plan Your Blog Content Strategy

1. Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience is the initial step in developing a successful blog content strategy.

Creating a blog is a straightforward process – combining words, publishing them on your website, and Ta-da! Your blog is ready. Nevertheless, if you aim to enhance your site’s online presence, the content should focus on subjects that people are genuinely interested in reading.

In order to generate interest with your blogs, it is crucial to determine the target audience first.

2. Understand your audience’s journey

Once you have identified your target reader, you can infer the kind of content that would capture their interest. Understanding your marketing funnel is crucial in generating ideas for blog posts.

When conducting an image search for “marketing funnel,” you will come across various versions, which may differ in terms of the number of stages or the terminology used to depict each stage. Yet, regardless of its form, a marketing funnel should outline the route that a user must follow to uncover your business.

3. Find the right blog topics for each stage of the funnel

To discover suitable blog topics, it is imperative to determine distinct content types that cater to your audience’s interests at each stage of the marketing funnel. Since individuals in the awareness stage seek different solutions or answers compared to those in the consideration and decision stages, it is important to align your content accordingly to attract them to your website.

4. Target the right keywords

Merely having knowledge about your blog’s target audience and the type of blog posts that might pique their interest is insufficient for devising an effective blog content strategy.

Blog content strategists and writers often encounter the situation where they eagerly publish a blog post, believing it to be captivating for their target audience, only to be disappointed when it fails to perform as expected.

Keyword research is often overlooked by writers or misunderstood as they fail to recognize its importance in generating organic traffic, resulting in its common occurrence.

Prior to conducting keyword research, it is imperative to have a clear understanding of search intent, which is a crucial element in keyword analysis.

5. Set up a clear editorial process

Without establishing a process that all participants can follow, blogging regularly, even with a well-defined content strategy, can become chaotic.

To prevent losing sight of your content strategy, it is crucial to establish an editorial process that promotes productivity and accountability among all team members responsible for assigned tasks.

To begin, establish an editorial calendar that clearly outlines the assignment of tasks to individuals and their respective deadlines.

6. Write with the intention of being helpful

Within the earlier sections, we have determined your specific audience, examined their progression throughout your marketing funnel, recognized their areas of interest, and established the keywords to focus on in your blog.

The reason you have created a buyer persona is to identify the individuals who have the highest need for your services. Additionally, you have followed the remaining steps to determine the relevant blog content your buyer persona will find valuable throughout their journey.

Writing the blog is the subsequent stage of the process.

If you have thoroughly examined the interests of your buyer persona at various stages of the marketing funnel as mentioned earlier, you are unlikely to fall into the common error made by many bloggers when they write articles solely to promote their services.

Ensure that you consistently consider your buyer persona and the funnel stage at which your blog would capture their interest when commencing your blog writing. It is essential to bear in mind that Google’s algorithm places significant weightage on search intent. Thus, while comprehending how Google perceives your article is crucial, prioritize writing it for human readers.

Remember to prioritize your target keywords and utilize content editing tools such as SurferSEO. These tools can guide you on which keywords to include, their optimal frequency, and where they should be placed within your blog. Below are some helpful tips for effectively targeting keywords.