When you first get going with inbound marketing, many people are focused on simply generating as...
Why not use a corporate blog to answer the questions your customers have? This is just one of many reasons why your business should blog. Read on to get another three good reasons.
A blog is not just an easy way to build relationships with your customers and prospects, it's also free (as long as you’ve got the time and resources, that is). And perhaps best of all? It is the perfect platform to provide prospects and customers with answers to all the questions they may have.
Still not convinced? Well, let's take a look at more benefits you can get as a result of a corporate blog and content marketing.
Why you need to have a corporate blog
We could probably have spent several hours listing out the many reasons why your company needs a corporate blog, but we will stick to four. The main reasons why a blog will revolutionise your marketing is because the blog will:
1) Drive traffic to your website
Wouldn’t it be great to get more traffic to the website? One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to create content that is perceived as valuable and relevant to your personas (target group) and distribute this content on, for example, a blog.
Think about how people find your website today. Either they already know about your business and type in the URL directly into the browser, or you can pay to reach them, for example, on social media and in Google.
Do you want to hear a little secret? Not only is it expensive to pay for traffic – but the flow of visitors will also stop as soon as you have spent your monthly budget for paid advertising. So how do you attract visitors for a long time without paying for it?
Together, these three elements can create miracles for your marketing. Just take a look at this:
1) Blogging helps you become visible on other channels than just the website
Every time you publish a new blog post, you also have something new you can post on social media. Engage your followers to comment, like and share so that people outside of this network also get a glimpse of your amazing business.
2) Each time you publish a blog post, you get an indexed page on your website
In short, every time you publish a blog post, you get one more chance to appear in search engines – and attract traffic from organic search.
And the best part of this? These blog posts will continue to retrieve traffic from organic searches as long as they are live on the blog. That means you can get leads from a blog post you wrote two or three years ago. In fact, almost 70 % of blog traffic comes from older blog posts that have been live for a while.
Read more: 6 facts about inbound blogging you should know about
2) ... and help you convert traffic to leads
It isn’t of much help to get a lot of traffic to the website if you fail to convert this traffic into leads. Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to turn the blog into a lead-generating machine: For example, by attaching a CTA to each blog post.
The content of the blog will help your prospects move through the buyer’s journey, and so it's important that you always introduce the visitor to a next step. Calls-to-action (CTAs) are buttons or links the reader can click to download something or signal their interest.
CTAs often lead to downloadable content like ebooks, reports, checklists and so on, but can also lead to forms where the visitor can signal his interest for attending a seminar or subscribe to a newsletter.
A call-to-action should lead the visitor to any type of content that is of such high value that the reader willingly gives away personal information in exchange for the content.
Not sure just how the process of converting traffic to leads really works? It's relatively simple:
- A new visitor arrives on your website.
- This visitor reads a blog post and sees a CTA that offers him to download a free e-book on inbound marketing.
- The visitor clicks on this CTA and is sent to a landing page. On the landing page, there is a form where the visitor can enter relevant information about himself in exchange for the e-book.
- The visitor fills out the form, submits it and the ebook is sent to his email address. He is now a registered lead.
Seeing that you now have received the email address and that the person is registered as a lead in the system, you can now start sending more relevant content to this particular person (as long as you have his consent). You can thus nurture this lead until he’s ready to buy.
3) Position yourself as a thought leader
You should use the blog to answer the questions your customers and leads have. It should not be a platform for you to brag about how good your company is. Why?
The answer is simple: If you create and publish relevant and high-quality content on your blog, this will help you build trust with leads and customers as well as establishing your company as an industry thought leader.
It will also improve the sales process because your prospects are more informed about what they need than what they would have been without your blog.
Not to mention, prospects will have built up a greater trust with your company and the solutions you sell because they have gotten all their questions and worries answered through the content on your blog.
4) Improve your SEO
Last but not least: Blogging helps you improve the website’s online visibility. One of the most important things you can do to rank higher in search engines is to continuously publish content. As mentioned earlier in the article, the more content you have, the greater chance you have of appearing in the search results.
Focus on the keywords and pillar topics you should use for your blog. Because Google’s algorithms now understand the relationship between different keywords better than ever before, you should move the focus from keywords to key themes.
If you organise your content in so-called "topic clusters", you will increase the likelihood that your content appears in search results associated with this topic. Doing this will improve your SEO significantly and thus help you climb up in Google search results – and again get more traffic to the website.
Want to learn more about pillar content and topic clusters? Read our article here.