If ramping up content production is your goal, a thriving blog has to be a top priority for your marketing team. If you aren't utilizing your blog the way you should, you could be missing out on an opportunity to comment on industry “hot topics” and establish your position as an authority in your space. Regular blogging increases traffic, improves your credibility online, and supplements your website to improve conversions and sales in the long term.
Ways You Can Use Your Company Blog
There are many ways you can get the most from your company blog. For example, you can use your blog to:
- Announce and disseminate company news such as upcoming events, product updates or launches, strategic initiatives, and more
- Build thought leadership through posting informational content that educates your audience on the alternatives to an issue they’re experiencing.
- Support pillar content by elaborating further on topics briefly touched upon in pillar pages, with links to the relevant pillar content.
If Your Blog’s Neglected, It’s Not Alone
Most of the blogs we see at Beacons Point when we take on a new client are criminally underutilized. However, that’s not to say a full-fledged blog will increase leads and traffic overnight. Blog strategy is a marathon, not a sprint, and it can take a lot for small marketing teams to devote the necessary resources to it when the ROI is not always plainly seen.
There are several reasons why a company might neglect its blog, including limited time or simply forgetting about it as marketing teams focus on other areas. However, many of these reasons fall under the umbrella of scarce resources. Blogging is time-consuming and isn't a simple process if done right. While it used to take as little as two hours to write a high-quality blog as recently as a few years ago, today it can take up to four hours or longer because of the increased demand for combined quality and quantity of content.
Many companies simply don't have the resources needed to maintain their blog, working without a dedicated content writer (or teams of writers) who regularly produce high-quality content. Even if they do have the resources, some companies abandon their blog because they don't perceive it as beneficial to their business. They may have tried blogging in the past, but the results were so disappointing that they discouraged the marketing team from continuing to build the blog. At the same time, success in other areas may lead marketing teams to stray from blogging simply because it seemed obsolete.
The Importance of Persistence
You may not get a handful of customers from the first several blogs you write, but over time you can begin to attract and engage an audience that boosts traffic and, eventually, conversions. As you spend more time and resources on blogging, you'll also start to establish your business as a leading resource for knowledge around a wide range of topics in your industry. Even better, you'll begin to create content that addresses people's concerns at every stage of the customer journey, meeting their needs as they search for specific problems and solutions.
The Benefits of Consistent Blogging
There are plenty of benefits associated with consistent blogging, making these efforts worthwhile if you take the time to grow your blog.
Improved SEO
Blogging can improve SEO efforts through the production of value-based content. Naturally, Google ranks content that its users find helpful. The more questions you can answer and information you can provide to engage visitors, the higher Google will place you in results for relevant search queries. Keywords may have been the top priority in the past and remain relevant, but the focus primarily has shifted to a “topic” focused approach. As Google’s algorithms have matured, they’ve gotten better at deciphering searcher intent and matching that with topically relevant results.
One key element that can make your blog an invaluable asset to your SEO campaigns is backlinks. It can be hard to get backlinks to your blog, but a network of authoritative sites linking back to yours is what Google wants. If you can write top-quality content in the form of highly shareable blog posts, you'll be more likely to get some high-quality backlinks that can significantly improve SEO.
In addition to written content, your blogs should also pair with rich, embedded video content. Searchers generally prefer video content over text and having a video that supplements or summarizes your blog posts can further engage readers and get them interested in your business. Subsequently, you can also further boost search engine rankings with combined video and text content.
Complete Topical Relevance
You can also take advantage of some blogging opportunities to thoroughly cover a topic and subtopics, giving readers the impression your business has ample expertise in a particular area. For example, we developed a campaign focused on buyer personas and how to build them. Based on this broad topic, we wrote several articles covering various subtopics in an attempt to answer all questions someone might have when learning about creating buyer personas.
By connecting all Buyer Persona subtopics to a central Pillar Page, Google can see the connection between all of the topics in the cluster and are much more likely to regard your content as authoritative thanks to your comprehensive topical coverage. Using this approach, referred to by HubSpot as “topic clusters,” content marketers can rank highly for valuable search terms as quickly as possible.
Lead Capture
If you create high-quality content that people find engaging, you're likely to gain your audience's trust through blogging. In addition to educating your audience, you can also take this opportunity to include an enticing call to action that can help boost conversions. For instance, you might lure a reader to a blog post by writing about a popular topic, and advertise a free eBook wherein they’ll find expanded content on that topic. All they have to do is provide some information about themselves (name, email, company, etc.) to gain access.
In other cases, you might encourage people to sign up for a newsletter if they enjoyed your content. Regardless of the type of offer or CTA, you can ultimately convert more leads through a well-constructed blog strategy.
Keep Current Customers Engaged
Regular blogging is also one of the best tools for keeping “top of mind” with current customers. Blogging allows you to retain and upsell whether through commentary on current events and industry news, new offers, new product or service launches, or additional educational resources that maximize the value you provide.
Tips for Making Blogging Easier and Better
The following are a few tips for improving the blogging process.
Include Videos on Your Blog
Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search traffic than plain text. You read that right, 50x!
Take the time to expand on topics covered in your written blog with interactive or engaging video supplements.
Get Buy-in from Leadership
Try to invest as much time and available resources as possible to build and maintain your blog. You'll see the benefits of doing so in the long term, which will help prove how valuable blogging can be.
The following are a list of some pretty resounding statistics curated from Optinmonster.com, a global leader in SEO, regarding the effectiveness of regular blogging.
- Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t.
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
- Internet users in the US spend 3X more time on blogs than they do on email.
- 72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic.
- Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts.
Find Content Writers
In some cases, you might be able to find people within your team capable of writing content. Try to determine who has experience writing content or copy and who would be comfortable spending time and effort on blogging. If you don't have the resources in your team, consider outsourcing content creation.
Suppose you use blogging to your advantage and do what it takes to build a broad foundation of content. In that case, your company will ultimately benefit by attracting new audiences and increasing customer retention. Spending a sufficient amount of time and resources on your blog will improve your rankings, lead generation, and reputation as a leading authority in your industry.
So this was one long-winded answer to your question. Yes! You need to be blogging.
