Use A Blog To Create Content

Blog posts are a great marketing tool for many reasons. You will likely know more about your industry than most, especially your customers but ideally your competitors too. Blog posts are a chance to share your knowledge and educate your audience. What’s more, once you’ve created a blog post, and updated your website, you can use it to create additional content for your Email Campaigns and Social Media platforms.

Email Campaigns

If you send your database a regular email campaign, whether it’s weekly, monthly or quarterly, you can include a paragraph or two of your most recent blog posts and then link off to your website for the rest of the piece. Not only does this drive additional traffic to your website, but it also keeps your content fresh and exciting.

Email Campaigns are a great way of regularly keeping in touch with your customers. By adding snippets of your blog posts in them, you’re able to maintain a good balance between product awareness, sales posts and educational or informative content.

Social Media Posts

Your blog posts can help provide a series of Social Media updates. Don’t just take the headline of your post and share a single update; you should be able to create several pieces of Social Media friendly content from only one blog post.

Schedule these updates spread out enough so as not to have too much repetitive content but within a suitable timeframe to ensure your blog post is as relevant as possible. It’s also worth mixing up your imagery when sharing varying posts to keep your content fresh, just make sure they’re all relevant to the blog post.

Brainstorming Blog Posts

If you’re looking to introduce a blog to your website as a method of content creation, then it’s worth writing several before you actually go live.

Having five or so blog posts ready to add to your site means you have a store of posts prepared and you can then post regularly for the first few weeks. This will subsequently give you enough time to write more content going forward for a steady stream of posts and content.

Start by writing a few posts about your products or services, then your industry and then related topics. These could be in the form of Top Tips, How To or Experts Advice. Create content that will add value to your audience and showcase your knowledge and experience within the industry to stand out from your competitors.

Next, source or design relevant imagery or GIFs to support the posts ready for your marketing content.

Creating Evergreen Content 

When using your blog to create content, you must bear in mind which posts are evergreen and which have a use-by date.

Evergreen content means it’s relevant to post at any time, without becoming irrelevant. You may have to consider the time of year, for example, Christmas or seasonal posts, but year on year they should still be relevant.

If your content is evergreen, then you can use these posts to plan a large amount of content in advance. However, if you have a use-by date, then you need to note this down against your posts, perhaps in your Social Media content planner, to avoid sharing out of date or irrelevant information.

Guest Blog

There are a few ways of keeping your blog, and therefore your content, fresh. One way is to invite a guest blogger to create a relevant piece for your website that you can share on your website, in an Email Campaign and across your Social Media.

A guest blogger could be an influencer in your field, another industry expert or even just an existing customer who has lots of lovely, informative, things to say about your product or services.

It’s essential to ensure your guest blogger is in keeping with your audience, and they abide by your brand guidelines and tone of voice – to an extent. Remember, the point of bringing in a guest is to hear from someone with a fresh voice.

Understand Your Analytics

Frequently review your results, across all your Social Media platforms, Email Campaigns and website, to understand what blog posts your audience are responding to best. Your objective is to share posts that generate the most engagement, emails with the best click-through rates and website pages with the most extended view time. Add trackable links to your posts to be able to monitor what viewers do once they leave your platforms and visit your website.

Your insights will allow you to write more of what your audience wants to see and increase your success rate as you advance. It’s also essential that you schedule these posts in with a mix of other content across your platforms. You may wish to create a content planner and schedule posts in advance to ensure you keep the right balance.