By Chantel Hall, Marketing Content Specialist
One of the most common pieces of content marketing advice given to businesses is to commit to consistent blogging - and for a good reason. It's an essential marketing activity for building awareness of your brand, educating your target market, and improving your standing on search engine results pages (SERPs), making it a critical part of your overall strategy.
Blogging serves some particular purposes and can help you accomplish your content marketing goals. Still, it's vital to ensure that you are not relying solely on your blog to fill all your content marketing needs. It must be utilized as a part of an overall strategy to be as successful as possible.
Creating free content is one of the best ways to build brand awareness. It allows you to showcase your brand's personality and your products or solutions and put that information directly in front of your target market. You can spread this awareness even further by guest blogging for other organizations and promoting your blog through social media channels and even paid advertising.
Blogging builds awareness of your brand that is different from awareness generated through social media or paid ads; it educates readers about your brand and your offerings, creating more meaningful awareness than what can be gleaned from a tweet or display ad. As we'll discuss below, this translates to more leads and better qualified and more educated leads.
Blogging stands out among other inbound marketing strategies because of the quality of leads it generates: website traffic from blogging typically includes more qualified leads and lower customer churn rates than other lead sources.
Leads who read your blog will be more informed about your industry, product, and business practices. When they decide to contact you, it will be because they've learned something that led them to want to communicate with your brand specifically.
Additionally, high-quality blog posts boost your credibility and potential customers' trust in your business. You can use blogging as a way to demonstrate your company's expertise and position yourself as a thought leader in the industry, helping to develop leads who see your company as knowledgeable and trustworthy.
One of the most tangible benefits of consistent, strategic blogging is that it generates additional pages and more content to be indexed by search engines, creating more opportunities for your website to be found organically by users. Every blog you post makes an additional page for search engines to crawl and index and increases the number of indexed pages on Google by even 50 to 100 pages leads to double-digit growth in the number of leads generated.
High-quality blog posts can be repurposed and used on different platforms and at various points in the sales process; for example, they can be a rich source of information for salespeople courting prospects and provide education at critical points in the sales process. 43% of companies create content specifically for use in the middle of the sales funnel. Using blog posts this way has the additional benefit of bringing sales and marketing together and creating a consistent, educational, and helpful voice throughout the entire sales funnel.
Blog content can also be repurposed to create a variety of other marketing pieces that generate leads. For example, you might collect a series of blog posts on a similar subject and create an ebook that prospects can download after providing their information. Blog content can be repurposed for a marketing email, a social media post, an infographic, or even form the basis of an episode of a podcast or a short video. Updating older content and republishing it is also a highly effective tactic; 51% of companies rated it as one of their team's most efficient content marketing tactics.
When implemented as part of a larger overall marketing strategy, blogging can be a highly effective tool for bringing in educated, qualified leads and building awareness of your company with your target market. Blogging regularly creates a library of content for your marketing and sales teams to pull from when nurturing leads, making it easier for them to educate prospects on your company's value proposition and convert them to a customer.
Sources
Hubspot, The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness September 2021
Hubspot, Why Blog? The Benefits of Blogging for Business and Marketing May 2021
Hubspot, Study Shows More Pages Indexed by Google Means More Leads
Hubspot, 5 Benefits of Educating Prospects With Free Content April 2021
Buffer Blog, The Ultimate Guide to Repurposing Content: 12 Ways to Extend the Life of Every Article You Write April 2014
Semrush Blog, Content Marketing Statistics You Need to Know January 2021
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