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Blog marketing strategy: How often should you publish?

Dara Carr blogging, content strategy

As marketers turn their attention to more engaging and interactive content, like video and live stream, it begs the question: is blogging still an essential part of your B2B content marketing strategy?

It certainly should be. But if you’re still not convinced by words alone, consider these statistics:

Businesses with website blogs:

  • Receive 97% more inbound links
  • Generate 67% more leads
  • Possess a 434%  higher chance of being ranked on search

Blogging is a powerful tool to build SEO, drive website traffic, and convert visitors into leads. It gives your brand a voice and platform to showcase your personality and expertise to your target audience. Since posts can be written in long form and are often heavy on research and filled with statistics, they’re seen as the “5th most trusted source for accurate information.”

Therefore, blogging helps you to establish trust with your target audience—essentially opening a new channel for further engagement with them.

You can’t, however, go into blogging without a blog content strategy in place. It isn’t enough to simply write a post or two, target a few keywords, and think a substantial amount of traffic and leads will roll in.

Instead, blogging is beneficial when it is done on a consistent, ongoing basis.  You’ll need to develop a blog content strategy with a multitude of posts that search engines will find relevant and informative.

That said, you’re probably wondering how many posts you should publish in a month?

Well, there are a few factors that’ll affect the frequency of how often you blog. First, let’s address what you might think would be the biggest factors: time and budget. While this may dictate the publishing cadence for many business blogs—it shouldn’t. In fact, what they should dictate is the type of content you produce.

In short, don’t waste your time and budget on churning out low quality, poorly-planned content just to fill the page. Instead, focus on content that your target audience actually wants to see and invest your time and budget on developing a collection of posts on those subjects.

Besides that, the other factors to look at when planning your blog marketing strategy should include:

Selecting the right goals for your blog marketing strategyMan looking out toward mountains with flags on top of them

What do you want to achieve with your blog? Your goals can be any number of things, such as:

  • Generating an email list
  • Driving website traffic
  • Converting traffic into leads
  • Improving SEO
  • Enhancing user experience
  • Building brand awareness and authority

Whatever goal you choose to focus on when developing your blog marketing strategy, it needs to be defined as a SMART goal: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

It’s almost pointless to create content without at least one goal for your blog in mind, and you should be creating a piece of content for every goal at least once per month. But in the bigger picture, those posts and goals should also tie into your B2B content marketing strategy and overall business objectives—they shouldn’t exist in their own silo.

Buyer personas

Man looking into a mirror while holding a bag

It’s important to create content specifically tailored to each of your buyer personas. While some pieces of content could have a wider, more encompassing audience, most of it won’t appeal to everybody, so don’t try to make all of your blog posts one-size-fits-all.

Look to address each persona’s pain points and opportunities that can be found at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

At least one blog post appealing to each buyer persona should be rolled out each month, and the frequency of blog posts appealing to each segment should be in line with how likely those personas are to visit your blog.

Your message(s)

Man surrounded by a ton of paper airplanes.

Your blog needs to be high value, and for it to have value, it has to say something. So what’s your message? You may have one main message that all posts point toward, or you could have different messages for every potential buyer persona, or you could have a message that is specific and timely. Regardless, it’s important to remember that you should only have one message in every post or you’ll risk diluting what you are trying to say.

At least one post should be created for each message you have. If it’s something ongoing, that means one post per month. If it’s a limited time message, at least one post should be published early enough that visitors can take action on it.

Content ideas

Man holding a light bulb while he sits at his desk

What is it that you want to talk about? You’ll need ideas to create a compelling, high value blog content strategy. While some businesses start out strong on this front—filled with seemingly endless ideas—there will come a time when the inspiration well dries up.

When that occurs, there are numerous sources you can use to help you brainstorm ideas.

  • Use a survey to ask your existing readers what they would like more information on.
  • Read through comments left on others’ blogs in your niche to see what people are interested in.
  • Look for what’s trending in your industry on social media.
  • Join groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and make note of the conversations being held there.
  • Leverage Buzzsumo to find topics in your industry that are doing well in terms of overall engagement across various social platforms.

Make sure to adjust your post frequency to be in-line with the number of ideas you have and the amount of information you need to get out there.

News

Illustration Man tosses a newspaper as he holds a box of newspapers in his other arm

Your blog posts are the perfect way to keep others abreast of your company’s current events. Major press release events normally deserve their own post. Personal updates, on the other hand, like employee anniversaries or fun inner-office goings-on could probably use solo posts, too. Smaller mentions might be better served by a round-up post once a month or once a week, depending on how much news piles up. Other marketing initiatives, like new white papers, count in this category too.

Keep room on your editorial calendar for current events and news. If you don’t have a lot of goings-on, you may not need to free up extra space—posting these ad hoc would be perfectly okay. But if you will have ample updates, plotting out one news-related post per week, per month, or even more often could make sense.

Ready for some recommendations?

Illustration of man giving a thumbs up.

While there isn’t a clear cut answer to how often you should post, as that varies per business and industry, you need to make an effort to reach out and provide value to your potential and current clients through informative content.

At the minimum, this is how often you should be publishing on your blog:

  • At least 1 post per month for each buyer persona
  • At least 1 per marketing goal
  • At least 1 for each message

Again, you want to make sure that the content you create is aligned with your overall blog marketing strategy. If you don’t have a documented strategy yet or aren’t sure if your existing one is working for you, then we’ve got you covered with our Killer Content Strategy e-book. Check it out below!

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