What if there was one digital marketing strategy that would increase your leads by 67 percent, make it 13 times more likely that you would enjoy a positive ROI for your effort, and help you to receive 97 percent more links to your website? Would you embrace that strategy? Of course you would. Not to do so would be practically like throwing money away.Now, what if that essential piece of digital marketing strategy is business blogging? Would you still embrace it?
How Blogging Bolsters Digital Marketing Efforts
If you have embraced digital marketing as a way to reach more of your B2B clients, you know that your website is vitally important to the process. So, how does blogging help your website do its job? Blogging helps in several ways.
SEO and Traffic: First, think about the way a client searches for your website. In most cases, the client may not be aware of your business name. He or she is simply typing a question or search query into a search engine box somewhere. For instance, if the name of your company is XYZ Inc. and you sell widgets, your potential client is more likely to type in "widget sales" than "XYZ Inc."
So, in order for your client to find you, your website needs to be ranking with search engines. By posting regular, high-quality blogs on your website filled with relevant content about the appropriate keywords and search phrases your client will be using to find you, you will acquire a higher page rank with search engines. The higher your rank, the more likely your website is to be seen and the more traffic you will have. So, business blogging helps with SEO.
The more consistent a person blogs then the more frequent the search engine spiders will come and crawl your site. When they come and crawl your site and see new content, they will determine that your site is active, is being managed and typically more relevant than static websites. Our motto for the past several years has been your website needs to be more like a publication and less like a brochure.
Lead Generation, Nurturing, and Conversion: Once you have all that traffic coming to your site, a good blog will keep your clients interested in interacting with you. By providing content via your blog that answers client questions, addresses issues your clients have, and offers real solutions, you will turn traffic into qualified leads. As leads come back again and again to read your latest blog post, you are building a relationship with those leads, nurturing them through the customer journey. You are building trust and establishing your brand. The result? When it is time for your leads to make a purchasing decision, your brand will be top of mind for them. That is when conversions happen.
Insight into Your Audience: Blogging also helps you develop your detective skills in two important ways. First, coming up with topics for a regular blog makes you have to think like your target audience thinks. When writing a good business blog, you are constantly asking yourself what the reader wants to know, how to best impart that knowledge, and how to move the reader to take action.
Secondly, capturing analytics for your blog reveals much about the way your web visitors think and feel. Blog analytics allow you to figure out what topics are most popular among your readers, which content they share on social media, and even what time of day they read your content. The more you know about your leads, the more empowered you are to nurture them and get them all the way through the sales funnel.
Don't know how to get started, start blogging about the top 5 items your clients consistently ask you. Whether that be product, services or something comparable about your business, blog about that. Then you can have great article to refer them back too!
The Hang-up
When new clients approach us, especially those that are in the B2B space, the first item of push back is content generation. We usually get the "you don't know our business, no one in our vertical market blogs. That isn't how business is done!" Do you feel that way?
The purpose of blogging, to sum it up, is for the following reasons...
- SEO and Search Traffic - you may not think it is important but the search engines certainly do
- Subject Matter Expert - having a consistent blog article especially around market and specific product will make you the authority in your space
- Lead generation - blogs have proven to help generate more lead and move potential clients down the sales pipeline faster
The Bottom Line
Effective blogging is an essential part of an overall digital marketing strategy. It drives traffic to your website, generates new leads for your company, helps you nurture those leads, and gives you increased insight into your customer base. Blogging is cost-effective and yields measurable results in terms of positive ROI.
Would you appreciate more tips on how to integrate blogging into your digital marketing strategy? Contact us today to begin building your business blog.
Written By: David Carpenter
