What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy in marketing that is based on creating content of value for your community or your target audience. This establishes yourself as an authority in your niche or field of business. It creates a strong relationship with your potential customers and in the end leads to increased sales without requiring hard selling.
One very popular form of content marketing is creating great content and posting it to your blog on a regular basis. Instead of typical outbound marketing, like cold calling or mailers, where you to your audience, the goal of inbound marketing is to have your customer come to you. If you’re not a big fan of selling or self promotion then this form of marketing could be right up your alley.
Reasons Your Business Needs A Blog
More Opportunities Found
A typical business website may only consist of 5-10 pages. While that could be enough to sell your proposition, it might not be enough to get your potential clients and customers to your website in the first place. That is where a blog comes in.
Each post you publish on your company’s website is another page of your website that will be indexed in search engines. This results in creating another chance for your website, and your company, to be found by people searching the web. Professionally crafted and targeted blog posts will result more leads via Google over time.
Helps Social Media Marketing
Your ideal customers and clients are probably already hanging out on social media. Why not let them find you where they already are? Your social media channels should be sharing content you’ve discovered that your audience will find useful and responding to any queries related to your industry that you come across. Also sharing your own content is something you should be doing on social media to get more visitors to your website.
However, if your site only has a few pages, all of which are focused on selling your business, then there’s only so many times you can share that content before it starts getting old.
But, with a busy blog, which regularly publishes useful content that answer questions, solves problems, and gives great value, you’ve suddenly got something to share on social media. Each tweet of a blog post is an action that has the potential to grow the number of leads heading to your site. Not only do you now have something of your own to share on social media, but the visitors that reach your site also have something to share of yours if they wish.
More Time To Connect With Potential Customers
While your website’s essential pages might be perfectly crafted, sometimes a visitor just wants more before they are ready to become a client, customer, or subscriber. Maybe they want to be sure you know your stuff, want more answers to their questions, want to get to know you better, or even be sure that you are still in business.
A regularly updated blog can help with all of this. Well placed links in the sidebar, header, or footer to your blog or its best articles can make it easy for your visitors to extend their stay on your site. This can then help them to get a better sense of who you are and what you have to offer.
With a blog, you now have a chance to win over those visitors that aren’t sold on your sales page alone. Furthermore, by also taking advantage of email marketing and using a plugin like Bloom, you can give yourself another chance to connect with those visitors who still aren’t ready to pull the trigger but also aren’t quite ready to walk away for good.
Create Lead Magnets
The main goal of your website might be to convert each visitor into a customer or client from the outset. However, your secondary goal should be to find a way to keep in touch with them until they are ready to sign on the dotted line. Creating a focused email marketing campaign is one very effective way of doing this. Get a visitor onto your email list and you can send them valuable content on a regular basis until they are won over, their budget permits, or for whatever reason they are finally ready to take action and start working with you.
A proven way to encourage a reader to join your email list is to offer a lead magnet – a free incentive given in exchange for signing up. However, it can be hard to create the perfect lead magnet that all your readers will want to get access to. When it comes to producing a lead magnet, one size rarely fits all.
However, by creating multiple lead magnets and pairing them with specific types of content on your blog, you can make them much more targeted and, therefore, more likely to convert. For example, someone lands at your site on a post on why responsive design is so important. The newsletter signup form on that page offers a free responsive design checklist in exchange for their email address.
Overall SEO Boost
As well as having more content from your site indexed in the search engines, there are a few other SEO related benefits of adding a blog to your business website.
In basic terms, the more often content is published on your website, the more often the search engine crawlers will visit your website and the faster new content will be indexed. This means that an important announcement you make or timely content you post stands a much better chance of being found faster by your audience, compared to if you’re website was dormant for long periods.
Search engines don’t want to send their users to out of date content and abandoned websites. Regularly publishing content on your blog is one way to signal to search engines like Google that your website is alive and well.
Acquiring links from other websites that point to yours is still one of the most effective ways to improve the search engine rank of your content. While, we’re not suggesting you go out and artificially build backlinks, each article you publish on your blog is another piece of content that another website might want to link to. Sales pages are hard to earn backlinks for, but it’s a lot easier for a useful blog post that provides a wealth of value.
Build Your Online can help!
At Build Your Online we are an all around internet consulting firm. Not only can we offer you a professionally designed responsive website or redesign, but other internet marketing services. Part of our standard Search Engine Optimization package includes content marketing blog posts to increase your internet exposure. We promise a positive return on investment on all our marketing packages and have strategies and packages for companies of all sizes and challenges.