When you are setting up a blog marketing campaign, you need to have a goal which is covered by several objectives. Meeting your objectives will help you reach your goal.
In this guide the idea is to create a mock case study of sorts that will walk you through one of the most common marketing ‘goals’ – that is to drive more sales. Now this goal is synonymous with driving more traffic because the theory for all digital marketers is that the more traffic you can drive to the main sales page or the point of sales, then invariably sales should increase.
Goal: To Increase Sales by Driving More Traffic to The Sale Page Via The Blog
Now you have your goal, you need to create a list of objectives that you believe will help to create a blog that will increase the amount of traffic your sales page attracts from online users.
Objective 1: Create Quality Content To Encourage People To Click Through
Quality content that people will take the time the read is hard to achieve. Content does not only mean words. You will need to include images, infographics, video, and attractive headings.
On top of this, you may also want to include a content list at the top of the blog so users can easily click to sections relevant to them. In the end, quality content will not only keep users on the page which decreases your website’s bounce rate, if written persuasively enough, but it will also get them to click through your sales funnel.
Objective 2: Link to The Sales Page from Within the Blog To Increase SEO Authority
One way to continuously increase your organic search results is to link back to your sales page from within your blogs. You can also link to other blogs that eventually lead back to your sales page.
The aim with the latter strategy may not be to lead people to the sales page but to create enough content that links back to the sales page so search engines deem that page as one of importance. One word of warning though, you will need to make sure you understand internal link strategies if you are going to dabble in search engine optimization.
Objective 3: Outreach To Relevant Blogs/Websites To Increase SEO Authority
Once again search engine optimization comes into play here and organic search will inevitably increase the rankings of your website, but only if you know what you are doing.
You should have only one thing in mind when you choose the websites you outreach to. Quality links! That means only outreaching to websites that have traffic. If they have traffic, then the website is ranking well on organic searches and as such the search engines see that site as one that holds authority within its niche. You will likely need to create the content yourself, so make sure you use writing tools to help you create high-grade content.
Objective 4: Use Social Media To Announce New Blogs
This is probably one of the most obvious ways to get traffic flowing to your blog. However, the one issue your social media marketing team may have is that this strategy overpopulates the social media channels.
Social media marketing is a delicate and balanced strategy used for brand building as well as promotions, new product announcements, and corporate social responsibility. For those that follow the business, they may become immune to these posts if the company continuously pollutes the followers’ feeds with social media post after social media post.
As a result, you will need to work closely with your social media marketing team to ensure the correct balance of posts that contain ‘new blog’ information fits in with the current strategy.
Objective 5: Expand into International Markets Using Paid Ads and Organic Search
Now one way to change a market that is flat-lining even if you are already ranking number for all the keywords, and you dominate the paid ads spaces is to expand into other markets. This objective could become a goal of its own with more objectives assigned directly to.
Now if you are an English-speaking company, then you may want to try and expand into other English language markets. You would then need to get more backlinks from websites within those global markets and/or expand your paid ads and social media to target those markets. If you already rank number one overseas too, then it could be time to hire translators and create multi-lingual pages.
If you do decide to take the long and complex route into foreign markets, then this is when you will need to create a whole new goal for this objective, and then assign objectives.
For example, you will need to start learning about the cultural values of the new market you want to target and so you will need software to unblock geo-restrictions so you can get local research data.
What Can You Take Away From This Mock Case Study?
The hope is that you now have an idea of how to properly set goals for your blog management strategy. Having a blog and just publishing content blindly is still a good idea because you are adding content to your website despite not having a strategy in place.
However, eventually, you will need a strategy in place and the bigger your blog gets, the more organized it will need to become, and the more authority it will have in the eyes of search engines.
You can then use that power to your advantage and start to create goals and objectives to drive more traffic to your sales pages via your blog.