Planning your 2024 blog strategy

Successful blogs take planning. That’s why having a strategy is so important. We need to make sure the topic is right, the infrastructure is there and you’ve got a schedule that works in the long run. 

Without those things you’ll go out all guns blazing in January and by March you’ll have given up. We don’t want to start and stop with blogs, what we want is long term consistency and that only comes from having a robust strategy. 

Why do you need a blog strategy?

Whether we’re talking about blogs, social or operations without a strategy you’re making it up as you go along. A strategy helps keep you focused and helps move you closer to your goals. Now we’re all aboard the strategy bandwagon. Let's talk blogs.

If you’re going to invest time, money and resources into your blogs they need to be serving a purpose. A strategy will help you to understand where they fit into your overarching goals, where they sit in your customer engagement plans and what you should be talking about. 

A strategy - even if it’s just two sides of A4 moves your blogs from being a tick box to being a meaningful activity. 

Isn’t it too early to plan your strategy?

2024’s months away…..isn’t it? 

Not really. When you take out the Christmas period we’re looking at a matter of weeks. If this is your first time blogging and you need to embed processes in your organisation or engage a freelancer to write your blogs then you need time to do that. 

It’s never too early to plan.

How to plan your strategy

It’s time for the practical steps. What should you include in your strategy? It seems obvious - you’ve written strategies a million times before. But if this is your first blog strategy then there are some particulars that can’t be missed.

Get specific

Start with the basics, the who, what, why, how. We want to be really specific, particularly around the who. 

It’s easy to try and aim our content at everyone but for it to work we need to be absolutely clear on who. And, just to complicate things, that might not be the same person each time. It might be that for some of your top level content you’re targeting one person then with your more detailed articles someone else. Map that out here.

We also want to be clear on how we’re going to know if it’s working. After all, there’s no point spending time on blogs if they don’t achieve anything. Trouble is, content is notoriously hard to evaluate success for. Think outside of the box. Are we looking at page views, clicks, dwell time, leads? Or do we need to take a step back and use UTM links from your social pages? Are you tracking your keyword rankings? Is your website linked with GA4 and Google Search Console? 

There’s a lot of prep that goes into evaluating your content’s ROI, so detail that here now and what needs to be done before you hit publish on your first blog.

Keyword research

We can’t talk about blog strategy without devoting a section to keyword research. This has to be the starting point for what you’re going to blog about. Hopefully you’ve got some targeted keywords that we can cluster our content around. But if you haven’t then it’s worth investing in some detailed keyword research that will create some ideas for what to write about. 

Then in your strategy you can identify 3 or 4 content themes and then a host of topics underneath with the relevant keyword or phrase identified. You can then also start to link those to the type of blog it needs to be. So if you’re in recruitment and need to build out some content around job interviews. You can take it from either the client or the candidate point of view - that’s your first differentiator. Then you could either do tips for success in carrying out interviews - top level content, or here are some interesting statistics about how different interview styles influence success factors - middle of the funnel, or this is how we worked with X to achieve X results - bottom of the funnel.

Because there’s no point blogging about something that your clients don’t care about. 

Schedule it 

We need to make sure that the publishing side of your blogs is covered in as much detail as the writing side. Because draft blogs aren’t useful to anyone. 

So the questions to think about here is who’s writing them? Are you doing it? A colleague? A freelancer? If so, how will that work? Do you have someone in mind? How will they be briefed? What’s the cost?

At the same time you need to determine your posting schedule. Are you going to write blogs weekly, fortnightly or monthly? Whatever schedule you decide needs to be realistic in the long term. Google loves regular content. Pick a day, pick a time and stick with it. 

Tied into your scheduling is publishing your blogs. Make it part of the process that you publish a blog, then a social media post is scheduled and it’s included in the next email. You need to share the blog for people to read it. No promo = no views. 

While we’re looking at the schedule, are there any events or milestones that need incorporating into your blog strategy? Do you always miss out on International Women’s Day or is the business having a birthday this year? Include those in the strategy so you can get ahead of yourself.

Review

For any new strategy it’s essential to build in review points. Moments where you’re going to look at what you’ve done, what’s working, what’s not, what needs changing and what needs scrapping. 

Figure out when those points are and put them in your diary. No excuses. 

Then use that time to check the objectives and success measures you’ve identified along with the day to day delivery and see if the process is working. Content is a long game so at 6-months you still might not have any results, don’t be discouraged. Look for the wins, no matter how small and then check back in another 6-months.

It’s never too early to plan your 2024 blog strategy and in a few weeks it’ll probably be too late, so don’t leave it any longer. 

Sit down and make a plan for how you’re going to incorporate blogs into your wider digital marketing strategy. Because when they’re used strategically rather than randomly, they can be a cornerstone of your success.

Still stuck on your strategy? Or have a strategy but need some content support. Drop me an email and let’s have a chat.