As a B2B company, we know the importance of sharing our knowledge of marketing to those learning the space and showcasing to our customers that we’re performance marketing specialists. The best place to start sharing said knowledge is through a blog, similar to what you’re reading now.
However, nothing screams ‘overwhelming’ more than getting to a site with widely varying topic options, mismatched content, and just general organizational chaos. This is where the importance of an organized content structure lies.
We broke down our best practices and tips for when it comes to getting the content structure ball rolling.
Keyword Research For Your Company
It’s important to understand where your company sits in terms of the keywords you want to rank for. As most marketers know, content is one of the best ways to make sure you’re ranking for a specific keyword while still providing valuable information. We consider our ideal keywords to be our “money terms,” which are then divided up into topics.
For example, we may have keywords listed under a ‘general marketing agency’ topic, but also more definitive ones for ‘performance marketing’. This is a great place to start visualizing your content structure. You can decide to have a rotation of content, where you target one keyword from each topic and have some variety, or choose to hone in on one specific topic that you may want as your cornerstone. From there, you would build out your content structure to support most, if not all, of the keywords you determined critical from that topic.
Brainstorming Topics + Ideas With Your Team
Let’s be truthful and admit that not all of us marketers are expert writers. We create powerful, impactful headlines and descriptions, but we’re limited in our number of characters, which helps us define the important information and delete the rest. So, when asking your team to come up with blog ideas and then write them, it can become daunting.
Here at OM, our strategy involved brainstorming topics as a team and gathering the blog ideas into a spreadsheet. It listed the idea, the target keyword, and a brief description of what the idea pertains to. This helps eliminate team members from feeling overwhelmed with trying to come up with a topic that sounds interesting and allows them to take one from the list and write as they want. This is also an excellent way to ensure that the blog topics are relevant, and remain within your content structure.
Write, Review, Edit, Post
Determining the topic and how it fits into your industry is half the job, now it’s time to write. This is another point in which structure is key, and ensuring that your reader stays engaged doesn’t just mean in terms of information. There should be a general structure for how your information is presented.
In school, we were taught the following to write:
Introduction
Main Point #1
Main Point #2
Main Point #3
Conclusion
In marketing, the structure isn’t much different, you just need to explain why:
Introduction The Problem
Define Your Why
Explain The Challenges
Provide The Solution
Summarize
Keep It Simple
Nowadays, if people are looking for information, they need it presented in a simple way that is quick and easy to digest. We live in a world where information is processed in a matter of seconds, so everything counts when it comes to content and how it’s organized. When providing information, define its relevance, explain the challenge that comes with the topic, and then provide your solution. By laying out this process, readers can stay invested because they see the issue and the problems that it could cause, and then want to stick around for the solution.
