Blogging consistently is hard work. Even if you manage to publish new posts regularly, there‘s no guarantee that your audience will keep coming back. In fact, the average bounce rate for blogs is a whopping 82.2% according to BloggingWizard.
If you want to turn casual visitors into loyal readers, you need a way to continuously entice them back to your blog. The solution? Embracing content themes.
What Are Content Themes (And How Do They Engage Readers)?
A content theme is a topic that you focus the majority of your blog content on for a set period of time, usually a month. Essentially, you make a single subject the star of your blog, exploring it from all angles.
For example, a digital marketing blog could choose "Mastering Facebook Ads" as their theme for the month. Their content might include:
- The Beginner‘s Guide to Setting Up Your First Facebook Ad Campaign
- 5 Proven Facebook Ad Copywriting Formulas to Skyrocket Conversions
- How to Scale Your Facebook Ads (Without Blowing Your Budget)
- Success Story: How XYZ Company 10x‘d Their ROI With Facebook Ads
The power of content themes comes down to 4 key benefits:
-
Themes make your blog bingeworthy. Focusing on one topic allows you to really dig deep and showcase your expertise. Readers can go on a learning journey with you.
-
Themed content is ultra-relevant. By homing in on a topic your target audience cares about, every post appeals to their interests and needs. You become a go-to resource.
-
Themes lend themselves to challenges and goals. You can rally readers around a shared mission related to your theme. Engagement skyrockets as they work toward the goal with your guidance.
-
Themes align your content with your business. Strategically choosing themes lets you support your overall brand and drive desired actions, like joining your course or buying your product.
But content themes don‘t just engage readers. They also make your job as a content creator easier. With a roadmap for your content laid out in advance, you can batch your writing and never run out of post ideas.
How well do content themes actually work?
You might be thinking this all sounds great in theory, but does it really make a meaningful difference in reader engagement? The short answer is yes.
Blogs that use content themes see 80% higher engagement rates compared to blogs with no overarching topic structure, according to a study by Content Marketing Institute.
And when Content Hacker implemented quarterly content themes tied to their flagship products, they saw a 327% increase in sales during themed months.
So how do you harness this incredible engagement power for your own blog? Follow this step-by-step guide to go from broad topic to blog content.
Step 1: Really Get to Know Your Target Audience
Any good content starts with a deep understanding of who you‘re creating it for. To develop relevant content themes, you first need to get inside the heads of your target audience.
Asking the right questions
Start by making a list of key questions that will help you understand your audience:
- What are their goals and aspirations related to your blog topic? What‘s motivating them?
- What problems or challenges are they facing? What keeps them up at night?
- Where are they currently at in relation to your blog topic (beginner, intermediate, advanced)?
- What kind of content do they prefer to consume (text, video, audio, images, etc.)?
- What else are they interested in outside of your main blog topic?
If you already have an audience, you can get these answers straight from the source. Send out a survey, post questions on social media, and mine your blog post comments for insights.
If you‘re starting from scratch, turn to tools like BuzzSumo and Answer The Public to find out what your target audience is searching for and sharing online.
Creating reader personas
The next step is to use your research to develop 1-3 reader personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal readers based on real data and educated speculation about demographics, motivations, and more.
For example, a sustainable living blog‘s reader persona might look like:
Eco Emma is a 32-year old marketing manager making $75,000 per year. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids. Emma is passionate about fighting climate change and wants to reduce her family‘s environmental impact. She‘s always looking for easy sustainable swaps for their lifestyle and home. Her biggest challenge is finding kid-friendly and budget-friendly "green" options. She likes actionable content with lots of examples.
See how specific that is? The more detailed you can make your personas, the better you‘ll be able to create themes and content that really resonate with your target audience.
Step 2: Identify Your Audience‘s Biggest Pain Points
Now that you know who your audience is, the next step is figuring out what they need the most help with. In marketing speak, we call these "pain points."
Pain points are key to engagement
Here‘s why pain points matter so much for content creation:
- Pain points are things your audience is actively looking for answers and solutions to. Content based around them is sure to get attention and engagement.
- Addressing pain points positions you as an expert who understands your audience‘s challenges and has the knowledge to help overcome them.
- Pain points make for focus areas you can build your content themes around. A single pain point can fuel a whole month‘s worth of blog posts.
For example, the digital marketing blog from earlier could identify "creating scroll-stopping ad creative" as a key pain point based on their audience research. This could easily become their content theme for the month.
How to find your audience‘s pain points
To uncover your audience‘s biggest challenges, use the same research techniques we covered in Step 1. But this time, you‘re listening and looking specifically for problems and obstacles.
Pay special attention to:
- Questions your audience asks you directly
- Frustrations or issues that come up again and again in places like social media comments and forums
- Keywords and phrases related to problems, like "struggle with," "trouble," "hard to," etc.
- Topics your competitors create lots of content around (clearly there‘s demand)
Once you have an exhaustive list of pain points, narrow it down to 10-12 that come up most frequently and would make meaty themes that could support a month of content.
Step 3: Turn Pain Points Into Content Theme Roadmaps
With your list of top pain points in hand, it‘s time to turn them into strategic content themes for the year ahead. For each pain point, come up with a clear goal or transformation that your month of content will help your audience achieve.
For example:
- Pain point: Creating scroll-stopping ad creatives
- Content theme: The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Crazy-Converting Ad Creative
- Goal: Help readers consistently produce ad creatives that drive clicks and conversions
Once you have your themes and goals outlined, break each one down into subtopics. Use each subtopic as a blog post that leads your audience toward the month‘s larger goal.
Under the ad creative theme, the blog content might include:
- 10 Ad Creative Trends You Need to Know for 2023
- 3 Secrets to Write Ad Copy That Practically Forces People to Click
- How to Create Attention-Grabbing Visuals for Ads (No Design Skills Needed)
- The Simple Framework We Use to A/B Test Ad Creative (And Double Conversions)
See how each post builds on the last to move readers from Point A to Point B? That‘s the power of content themes in action.
Bonus Tips to Maximize Engagement With Your Themes
While simply creating themed content can do wonders for engaging readers, there are some extra things you can do to drive even more interaction:
Create theme-based challenges
Remember those shared goals we talked about? A fantastic way to engage readers is to turn them into a challenge related to your theme.
People love a good challenge, especially when they‘re working toward something together as a community. Think 30-day challenges, weekly prompts, or even year-long projects.
Your sustainable living blog, for example, could create a "Going Zero Waste Room by Room" challenge to go along with a zero waste living themed month. Each week, you give your community a room to focus on cutting waste from, with tips and encouragement along the way.
Not only will this get readers excited to keep coming back to your blog, but it also requires them to actively engage with your content in order to participate.
Develop bonus content upgrades
Take a page out of the content marketing playbook by creating exclusive bonus content that your readers can access in exchange for joining your email list. Content upgrades like checklists, workbooks, and resource guides add value to your themed content while also helping you grow your audience.
To re-use our digital marketing blog example, if one of their theme posts is "The 5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Facebook Ads Manager," their content upgrade could be a printable PDF checklist with those 5 questions.
Readers who want that handy reference will gladly hand over their email address to get it. And once they‘re on your list, you have even more opportunities to engage those theme-interested readers with your email newsletters and promotions.
Don‘t forget internal linking
One of the best ways to keep readers on your site longer is by suggesting more relevant content for them to consume next. That‘s where internal linking comes in.
As you‘re writing and publishing your themed posts, be sure to include links to other relevant posts within the theme. You can do this in the body of your posts as well as in a "related posts" section at the end.
By connecting the dots for your readers and showing them where to go next, you create a sort of content journey that‘s hard to step away from. Plus, all of that continued engagement signals to search engines that your content is valuable, which can give your SEO a nice boost.
Repurpose your themed content
Finally, don‘t limit your themed content‘s potential by keeping it in just one format on one platform. To reach and engage the maximum number of people, consider repurposing your blog posts into:
- Social media posts (with attractive infographics)
- Podcast episodes or audio versions of your posts
- YouTube videos
- Guest posts on other websites and blogs (with a link back to the original)
- Email newsletters
Not only does repurposing help you squeeze more engagement out of the content you worked so hard to create, but it also helps solidify your status as a go-to expert on the topic everywhere readers might find you.
Ready to Watch Your Blog‘s Engagement Blow Up?
Consistent, strategic content themes are hands down one of the most powerful ways to turn your blog into a must-read resource for your audience. By making one key topic the focus for a month, you entice readers to keep coming back for the next installment.
But content themes don‘t just help your audience – they help you too by giving structure and direction to your editorial calendar. With an overarching goal in mind for your themed content, it‘s so much easier to generate relevant post ideas and create cohesive content.
Plus, all of that juicy engagement data will give you concrete insights into what topics and themes your audience likes best. Paying attention to things like which theme posts got the most comments or email opt-ins can help inform your content strategy moving forward.
To start harnessing the power of content themes on your own blog:
- Get crystal clear on your target audience and what makes them tick
- Identify their key pain points and challenges related to your blog topic
- Choose 10-12 big, juicy pain points to turn into monthly content themes
- Break down each theme into goal-focused subtopics and post ideas
- Add challenges, content upgrades, and content repurposing to increase engagement
By dedicating the time upfront to mapping out a smart, strategic editorial calendar around content themes, you‘ll reap the engagement rewards for months to come.
Your target audience is out there, hungry for solutions to their problems. Become their hero by providing the exact content they need packaged into enticing themes, and watch your blog become their new favorite destination.
