10 Tips for a Successful Blog Marketing Campaign

What exactly is blog marketing? It’s any process that publicizes or advertises a website, business, brand or service via the medium of blogs. For example, guest blogging on another blogger’s site can lead to increased traffic and backlinks from that site, all of which will help to drive up your search engine ranking and improve the reach of your own website in the long run. However, many first-time bloggers who start an advertising campaign make one fatal mistake— they don’t create an exit strategy!

1) Define your blog marketing goals

Without knowing your business goals and where you want to go with your brand, it can be difficult to know what kind of content you should be putting out. If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you know when you’ve arrived? Before creating content or setting up campaigns, define your business goals first. Here are some tips on how to determine what your business goals are: * What do I hope to achieve over the next 5 years? 10 years? * What do my customers look like? How old are they? Where do they live in relation to me or my company headquarters?

2) Choose your target market

Step one to starting your marketing campaign is choosing your target market. For many businesses, it makes sense to try and appeal to as wide an audience as possible. However, sometimes it makes more sense to focus on just one type of person. Doing so can help you generate leads at a much faster rate and make your overall marketing campaign much more effective. If you’re in doubt about who you should be targeting, try creating two separate ads with two different target markets and compare them when they’re done.

3) Plan a content strategy

Whether your goal is to drive traffic, generate leads or simply to inform potential customers about your product or service, it’s important to build and maintain a content strategy. A strategic marketing plan considers what type of content you need and when that content should be published. In addition, it factors in how often you need to publish that content—daily? weekly? monthly?—and where people will find it. For example, do you want people stumbling across your posts on social media?

4) Select channels to reach people

Ideally, you want to reach people who will be interested in what you have to say and are most likely to share your content. As such, a great place to start is by creating a list of your top 20-30 social media influencers in your industry or topic of choice and researching which channels they’re active on. Identify which channels match up with their preferences and goals so that you can tailor your marketing tactics accordingly.

5) Create great content

The best way to market your business is through great content. If you don’t have interesting, useful and engaging material on your site, no one will pay attention to it. When you create great content, though, people share it and link to it because they find value in what you write. They might not buy from you at first (unless your marketing plan revolves around building an audience rather than making sales) but when they need what you have to offer, they’ll come back because they trust you.

6) Drive traffic with SEO

The first step to successful marketing is making sure your content is seen by as many people as possible. SEO—or search engine optimization—is a way of getting your site noticed by search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. When someone searches using one of these sites, Google will show an organic list of results—that is, results that aren't paid advertisements. You can use SEO tactics to improve your rankings in organic search results and drive more traffic to your site.

7) Nurture leads with email and social media

To nurture leads, you need to build trust with your audience. And what better way to do that than with email and social media? The goal of lead nurturing is to make your audience feel like they’re already connected with you and your business before they even have an interaction with either. By doing so, you give them permission to message or reach out when ready.

8) Measure your results

It’s easy to get lost in the flurry of hustle and bustle that comes with running a business, but if you don’t measure your results, it can be difficult to figure out what is working and what isn’t. When launching a new marketing campaign or promotion, it is important to measure as much as possible so you can figure out how well it worked and if it needs any fine-tuning.

9) Stay engaged with communities

To have your campaign truly take off, you need to be an active and vocal member of related communities. If you’re blogging about how to train Siberian huskies, get on Twitter and start chatting with other people who are into dogs. If you’re blogging about how to get over a breakup, create your own subreddit or social forum where people can connect with each other.

10) Publish great posts

The most important step in any successful marketing campaign is to create and publish great content. No matter how you promote it, or what kind of budget you have, if your content isn’t great no one will click on it. Quality over quantity is crucial when trying to market your business online. Once you've come up with content ideas, make sure to spend plenty of time researching and sourcing high quality images that are relevant to your articles.