Blogging is nowadays paramount to the online success of a marketing campaign. Those that realize this and are on board with the trend are reaping in huge benefits. Those that do not will lose a lot in front of the competition that uses blogging in marketing campaigns. The average marketer will only use blogging for the holiday season. The experienced one will implement a well-detailed strategy all around the year.
In order to fully understand why blogging is so important for a marketing campaign, let us focus on the main advantages of using it. You will surely come to the same conclusion.
Business blogging drives traffic to the company website
An increase of website visitors is always beneficial. We need to realize that people normally find websites in the following ways:
- They type the address directly in the URL browser but that means that they already know the address from somewhere.
- Traffic can come when you pay for it thanks to AdWords and similar services but this is highly expensive.
- Traffic comes from search engines but you need good rankings and something present for that to happen.
We can say that the main traffic sources considered by the online marketer are search engines, social media and blogging. A regular company site does not have many pages. They are not often updated. These are two huge problems when referring to site ranking in search engines and content you can share on social media.
Blogging steps up as a wonderful solution to the lack of site pages problem. When you create a blog, you gain another page that is indexed by the search engines. This increases the possibility of appearing higher and gaining more organic traffic. SEO blogging benefits are highly documented and it is not at all difficult to learn about them.
We should also add that blogging will aid your business to get discovered faster on social media. The content that you create will be shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and whatever else is relevant. That exposes your business to a new audience.
Converting traffic into leads
As more traffic comes to the website, there is an opportunity to transform it into leads. Just like you gain a new page that is indexed every single time you write a new blog post, you also have one extra opportunity to gain a lead. This is because of a really simple concept: adding lead generation CTA to every single written blog post.
A call to action can be a free whitepaper, fact sheet, trial, webinar or eBook. Basically, any content would work if you offer quality that is of high quality, thus making the visitor want to exchange information for it. Traffic to lead conversion is really simple:
- A visitor comes to a page
- A call to action is seen
- The call to action is clicked and leads the visitor to a form to fill with information
- The form is filled, information is submitted and the free offer is received.
Blogging to increase authority
A really good business blog will answer questions that customers or potential leads have. When consistently creating high quality content that is seen as helpful for a potential customer, authority will automatically be established. This is one fact that is highly important for the service and sales professionals.
The problem is that it is difficult to assess and analyze authority. There are no great stats that you can use like leads or traffic. However, if you do want to try measuring, you can take an approach that is similar to sales measurements. Remember that blogging offers many sales enablement possibilities like:
- When a prospect finds an answer to a question through a blog post, they will trust the brand when the sale process begins.
- When the prospect becomes more educated about what you offer, your industry and the market, the sales conversion is more productive.
- When an in-depth explanation is necessary for a specific topic, a blog post can answer highly specific questions. This moves the entire sales process faster and the author will be seen as a highly valuable resource to look for when information is required.
Long term results are driven
Blogging allows you to bring in really long term results for your campaigns because they always appear on the internet. Let’s say that you have a blog that is highly popular and that you write a good post that would generate 10 leads today. Tomorrow you can write another one while the initial one can generate more views and 5 more leads thanks to social media exposure. Many believe that this is where the sales end. This is not the case.
As the post we mentioned ranks higher in search engines, more leads will be generated for long periods of time, sometimes years. With a company blog, you can gain traffic that comes from numerous sources for a long period of time based on content you created a long time ago.
Business blogging secondary benefits
We can say that there are so many reasons why you want to blog as a part of a business marketing strategy. Although they are not as important as what we mentioned above, they are still benefits. Blogs are wonderful outlets that the marketers can use in order to communicate important information like event data or product releases. Attention for the company focused initiatives can also be gained when an audience already exists for a blog.
We can say that the most important reason why blogging is a great addition to a company’s marketing campaign is the fact that it can help increase authority and sales. Any company that is trusted will generate more sales and blogs are wonderful at creating industry awareness.
In the event that you want to start your business blog or increase the results that you have with the current one, remember that consistency is highly important. You need to invest time and sometimes money into blogging. However, the money that you invest will be back since you increase your sales.