- Campaign: Digital Marketing staff training
- Challenge: Keep them intrested in a long form piece
- Audience: Content Creation teams
Blog content writing is too often created by instinct, content chosen by hit and miss. Campaign-based blogging, by contrast, is much more effective, profitable and (OK, in the long run) more fun.
Blog marketing is at its heart campaign-based blogging. It is simply a series of posts planned in advance.
These posts, in different and imaginative ways, grow and develop a message.
Each post plays out a definite topic, so that for practical purposes, a campaign is a series of related topics.
But you got that from the title, we realize.
The heart of the matter: where do these topics come from? They come from your users, or rather, your work to discover what your users are really seeking, their needs, their problems, their culture and personality. Not by instinct, not what you think is important…what they think is important.
These topics are aligned—more, connected at the hip—with your business, or rather, your close connection with what is most valuable for your brand right now. As business bloggers, we are accountable: we are tasked with helping the business grow. Or why else are we here?
Jump to:
Posts that are human-centered: speak to your users needs
Qualitative outreach: the User Interview
Quantitative research: what the data has to tell you
Now Make your topics listTopics
Build your team, create your workflow
POSTS THAT ARE HUMAN-CENTERED
The result, done well, speaks directly to your users needs and their problems because you have worked hard to understand them. The topics you choose are those which vividly show how your brand directly solves those problems, meets those needs in a way no one else can.
So, for example, take this very post. It is part of a blogging campaign whose message is that website content will bring users closer and closer to becoming leads, customers, followers,…but only if this content speaks directly to their user needs. It is known as human-centered content, a trend word, but one with lots of meaning.
Several more posts will follow this one. We will help you create blog content that, in different ways, gets results, But the same message will run through all of them.
This can be said for all the content on your website. To succeed it must all be human-centered, that’s true.
But a blog campaign adds a powerful productivity payoff because its content plan is created in advance. The plan remains the same, and that’s where your web team— ultimately your brand—reaps the benefits.
A SERIES OF TOPICS
At the heart of your campaign is a list of topics, where each topic becomes the focus of a post.
We have said that this list of topics starts with your users needs: it is “human-centered.” How to discover those needs?
That journey takes two paths:
- The qualitative, meaning direct personal outreach and dialog with people typical of your audience. At the heart of this part of your outreach are your interviews, or more informally, your conversations with typical users:
- The quantitative, meaning indirect research that reflects what you are seeking to discover about your typical users. This commonly starts with keyword research and analytics pioneered by search engine optimization (SEO). There are literally dozens of techniques and places on the web to take this journey. In this post, we will stick with some basics which you can use right away to great effect.
QUALITATIVE OUTREACH: THE USER INTERVIEW
At the heart of your outreach is the user interview, as used for years in the fields of user experience and of design. At our agency, we have been careful to integrate user experience (UX) and design professionals, and their tools and experience into the content creation process.
But even if we are not all UX pros, techniques can be learned that will deliver a rich source of ideas that will click with your audience… because they come from your audience.
Mastering the art of the user interview can yield a gold mine of subjects, ideas, and language for your blog posts.
According to interaction–design.org:
Interviews can be a great way to empathize with your users because interviews can give you an in-depth understanding of the users’ values, perceptions, and experiences.
Interviews are semi-structured. The interviewer prepares some interesting and provocative topics and questions in advance. They are not informal chats.
In presenting your questions, don’t even hint at an answer, leave them open ended. The goal, again, is to find out what’s not working for them so that later you can show how yours is just the product or service they need. Later. You are not asking them for answers or solutions. You are asking them for problems.
As a UX person on our staff puts it “the idea is largely to get them talking, to hear their stories.”
Patrick Thornton’s How to Conduct a user interview is a fabulous piece, well worth reading.
We also like More on user interviews from interaction-design.org.
Intrigued? In future posts, will dig more deeply into how to understand your client base, and where to get topics for posts.
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH: WHAT THE DATA TELLS YOU
When looking for data about what interests and drives your users, hiding in plain sight is Google. A typical Google page actually contains incredibly useful information about what your users are searching for.
And isn’t “what they are searching for” just another way of describing the topics you are looking for?
(In a future post we will explain important and powerful analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, as well as third-party digital marketing apps like SEMRUSH, Ahref and MozPro.)
So start here: enter any written search in Google and the search engine autosuggests a number of variations. With autosuggestions, Google is looking for more about your initial or seed search. It is probing for the searcher’s intent.
And so are we!
Take a simple Google search like “common injuries to runners.” Google autosuggests several possible questions, such as “What are common runner injuries…?“ “What do I do about common runner injuries…?“ “What are some statistics about common runner injuries?”
Each auto suggestion could be its own topic in a campaign about runners injuries.
But wait there’s more.
LONG TAIL KEYWORDS
Scroll down some, and a second list is found at the bottom of the Google search page under the title “People Also Ask” and again, toward the bottom, “People Also Search For.”
These are typically longer and more specific suggestions, phrases or questions which will ultimately become “long tail keywords” and are also, you guessed it, possible topics.
The browser extension Keywords Everywhere takes the Google results page further yet. For any given search, KE shows a longer list of long tail keywords, i.e. topic ideas. Furthermore it shows you Google’s People Also Ask and Related Keywords sections quantified by popularity. So when consulting People Also Ask…you can discover how often they ask (Search Volume). And for those Related Keywords, you can get a good sense of whether you can rank for them by checking how much competition might there be if you use these (CPC)? *
These are the beginnings of keyword research, a critical process of ferreting out the words and phrases that people search for…topics of their interest. Keyword research is a field that deserves its own treatment.
In a future post we will explore researching keywords. And we will point you toward important and powerful analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, as well as third-party digital marketing apps like SEMRUSH, Ahref, Ubersuggest, Spyfu, MozPro and others.
NOW MAKE YOUR TOPICS LIST
Now you have some of the tools to create a topics list, both from your person-to-person (qualitative) research and your data (quantitative) research.
Each post should focus on a keyword which has significant numbers of searches per month. In our above example “blogging“ is such a keyword, with 246,000 searches on Google every month according to Ubersuggest.
But we don’t expect to compete with the gigantic firms who virtually own keywords like this. This kind of result is out of the league for small and medium businesses. Only firms with very deep pockets have the mean to land on the all-important Google first page simply by using these.
Instead, these major keywords act as categories which signal to our users, and to Google, what to you expect from the post. Within the post, more specific keywords, “long tail keywords” like the ones we suggested above, will be much more Google-friendly for you. Use several; three or four within each post.
Now create a list of 10 to 12 topics, each mapped to a focus keyword, and to several specific long tail keywords.
BUILD YOUR TEAM, CREATE YOUR WORKFLOW
Now that you understand the basics of a topic list, time to put the five building blocks of a blogging campaign in place.
Your Team, Your Workflow
Success is not possible without assigned and accountable roles within a repeatable workflow. Size of the team will change according to the company and campaign. But the basic roles on a content creation team should include: owner, author, subject matter expert, research and analytics.
True, one person may need to take on multiple roles. But we would strongly advise against the wall to common tendency of small businesses to combine all these roles in a single person.
As you can see, considerable effort, and specific expertise is involved in profitable content creation, like a blogging campaign.
Roles should be formal, accountable, and part of a planned workflow.
Your Audience Personas
Clearly document your audience, it’s demographics and psychographics, its questions, problems and interests as uncovered by research. A popular way to bring this research to life is to create a written persona, a fictional profile for each customers type.
Core Topics
Document these as noted. Schedule them using an editorial calendar—a must-have tool.
Metrics
Make sure your company has agreed on measures of your success. Assume nothing.
Outreach
Begin to assemble a list of influencers and others to whom you will reach out in promoting your blog series. The goal is a dialogue. You are building your network, and at the same time drawing even more ideas for further posts.
These five pieces are there from the beginning, and it’s upfront work. But then they are in place and you are free to fly.
Want more detail? Sure! Stay tuned to this blog series for details.
BUT WHAT IF THINGS CHANGE?
OK, nice to have plans. But of course things change over time. Some posts will draw traffic. Others will not. You will keep using what works, and discard what doesn’t.
Stuff happens that you couldn’t possibly predict. Great! These are the cool and exciting things about blogging. Have fun with it!
But though lots will change, your five fundamental building blocks do remain fixed.
And that’s where the productivity payoff kicks in.
Here’s the practical benefit: Do the research and planning first and you’ve done it for potentially months of individual blog posts. In advance. Bingo.
PASSIONS AND INSIGHTS
Here’s an interesting thing. With a content strategy in place, you can let it flow. Paradoxically, once you’re settled on the big stuff—the goals, audience, assigned roles and workflow—you’re free to let your imagination fly.
The campaign is alert to chance, accidental and unforeseen opportunities. It allows for the passions and insights of individuals to shine through.
In this way, when marketing your business is infused with imagination, that’s where you may connect with users’ emotions. Where your business meets with success because it authentically excites and helps people. Now that’s cool.
AN INCREDIBLE TIMESAVER
The blogging campaign approach is an incredible timesaver, quality-maker, and team builder. It focuses and develops your messaging in a way that random blogging-by-instinct never can do.
Please stay tuned as we give you many more practical tips for executing a great blogging campaign. It’s cool. And it works.