Blog marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on creating valuable content, search engine optimization (SEO), audience engagement, email and social media promotion, and continuous measuring and refining strategies for maximum results. As a B2B growth marketing leader, your ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and convert those leads into customers. However, you may have a lot of questions on blog marketing—what it is, how to implement it successfully, and whether it is relevant to help increase sales and build your brand. Over the last decade, businesses have increased revenue
Blog marketing is using a business blog to reach your target audience to educate them on topics that interest them. By continually educating through content you become a thought leader in their mind and when they are ready to purchase will think of you over another brand. Let’s first acknowledge the pros and cons of blog marketing: Pros: Increase website traffic, search engine ranking, build trust and credibility, engage your market, and create more opportunities for revenue.
A. Blogs are hard-working business tools. In short, when you understand your prospects and the buying journey they encounter, your blogs will generate high-quality leads. Knowing your leads better will help marketing and sales organizations become more effective and analytical. Your leads are only as good as the website that produces them—meaning if you have the right topics, SEO content and a consistent way to gather insights to what’s working and what’s not—you’ll generate quality leads. The overall goal is to educate buyers so they understand what you do, your category, and your product and search out more information to make an educated decision.
A. SEO significantly impacts lead generation by influencing online visibility, user experience, and trust. It increases brand recognition, establishes trust and credibility, improves traffic, creates better content quality through keyword research, increases ROI, and grows your business. SEO allows you to understand how your potential customers find information about your brand. The best SEO service is a company that understands that the right tools for your business will vary depending on the type of business you have and your ideal audience.
A. There are many strategies to get more traffic to your blog and the first is to do your keyword research for every content campaign and blog post. And that includes leveraging your competitor traffic for your content strategy. Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can fill any content gaps and discover top keywords your competition is ranking for. Knowledge about your competitor’s website traffic and the strategies behind the traffic can be a game changer for optimizing your business growth. You’ll want to keep your blogging cadence up and maintain a strategic and consistent schedule, leverage long-form content, improve your on-page SEO, refresh outdated content and use analytics for more traffic insights. Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko, shows you how to write a blog post the right way and get massive traffic. . .
A. Keeping an eye on your competition will help you understand your competitive advantages and disadvantages relative to those in the market. Learning about your business in relation to your competition will broaden your knowledge about your target audience so you can constantly refine your business strategy. Use tools to identify opportunities to enhance performance and give you the backup needed to prove ROI. Analyzing your competitors’ digital presence is exceptional for understanding what marketing methods work in your industry. It’s an opportunity to identify topics your competitors don’t cover that you can leverage to drive traffic to your site.
A. Start by writing in the voice of your customer. Your customers want to know, ‘What’s in it for me?’ (WIIFM) The best combination is 80% educational and customer experience content and 20% self-promotional. It is a tried and true social media strategy and holds true for blog posts. It simply suggests that only 20% of content should be promotional, while the other 80% should educate, inform, and entertain. Customer experience content at its best. And do your research. Plan your content with keyword research. And stop going for the keywords you have no chance of ranking for. For example, if the keyword difficulty is extremely high and your domain authority is low. Keyword difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword based on a 100-point scale. Your content campaigns need to fill a void in your customers’ minds to be relevant and helpful. If they are searching for a solution and you have content that aids in that fulfillment, you have won half the battle. Your audience will continue to seek your brand as the answer to their challenge.
A. It varies. It depends on how much influence your website has already, your domain authority, whether you’re ready to scale your content and publish strategic content on a consistent basis, your website speed, and so many other factors. What we can say is assuming you’re hitting all the sweet spots—optimization, targeting ideal topics with QUALITY content, you’ll see a turn toward great improvement within 9-12 months. SEO takes time to generate traffic and leads. So the value in the early months can be low but exponentially increase over time. You need to create content that appeals to your audience in the different stages of the buyer’s journey, align content efforts across sales and marketing to be the most effective, consistently produce content and measure if it’s working, differentiate yourselves from competitors (and use content to show your differences) and use subject matter experts for thought-provoking, unique content.
It’s common to have a consistent style of writing for all blog articles. However, achieving success for your website involves adopting a strategic approach that includes using different content formats and content mix. The content mix should strike the right balance between being informative and educational while supporting your marketing strategy. The shift in your content marketing strategy starts with knowing the different formats and how each piece will influence the decision-makers and your SEO.
A. A call-to-action is basically an invite for your readers on your blog to take a specific action. They are a logical extension of your blog posts. A well-crafted CTA talks to their audience and understands the words they are looking for. When calling a user to action, be concise and meaningful with text that explains what the link or button does. Use action-oriented text.
A. Website metrics tell the story of how your audience is engaging with your site. From page views, average time on page, to conversion rates—all tell a part of the narrative. While conversion rates, monthly visitors and click through rates are tied as important metrics, we look at overall domain authority as well. Your domain authority score is considered a top-level indicator of your websites’ ranking power. Based on a scale of 1-100, the closer to 100, the more likely your site will rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
A. Let’s stick with non-paid ways. Think social media and email marketing. Posting a blog post on LinkedIn or Twitter can get you organic traffic and interest if done correctly. Slapping a link won’t cut it. You need to repurpose the blog post to fit the platform you want to share to. Social selling uses social media platforms to build and nurture relationships with potential customers. Providing value by offering thoughtful content and answering questions for prospects connects you with peers and potential buyers by attracting, engaging, and influencing key decision-makers. A strong content strategy is the key to achieving your social media content marketing goals. The strategy becomes your game plan for creating and distributing your business’s content.
A. Blogging and email marketing work perfectly on their own, but when combined can yield remarkable results. Blogs establish authority, build trust, and enhance search engine optimization. Email marketing is a personal channel with high ROI that can nurture your leads and engage your audience. Together, they produce content for email campaigns, and generate more traffic. You can send highly personalized messages and experiences through content, which helps build trust and create brand awareness. Email caters to the entire customer journey and it’s inexpensive compared to paid advertising. Email is a trusted channel where you build and nurture relationships.
A. Blog ROI can be found in higher web traffic, more leads, conversions, brand awareness and authority. To calculate blog ROI, you need to figure out how much revenue you earn from a given metric. At Responsify, we help our clients attract new customers by leveraging Inbound Marketing. To help them get the most out of their marketing budget, we gather a metric called Customer Lifetime Value, also known as CLV. This metric helps determine the best strategy to attract and close their highest yielding customers, so they can grow their business as fast as possible. Your customer lifetime value calculation helps your team make more informed business decisions, determine sales and revenue potential, and align your marketing and sales efforts.
A. We get it. The increased pressure on organizations to maintain customer experience and drive growth has made marketing leaders busier and more drained. And this includes writing specific industry content. The longer you create content, the more you find the challenges to continuously create enough to keep building momentum against competitors producing more and more B2B content. Outsourcing may be your answer. By outsourcing content, you can simplify your workload, ensure a consistent flow of high-quality content, and focus more on strategic aspects of your business. (less tactical, more strategical) Outsourcing content creation saves you time, adds more value with a team overlooking each piece—too many content marketers are operating alone or with a small staff trying to do it all. (stretched too thin). It’s more scalable – consistent publishing of engaging content and you’ll get fresh perspectives with experts in their fields, which leads to a strategic approach to content marketing. It helps you declutter and focus on what matters and lets an extension of your team produce content for greater returns. We vet and you rate our writers from most preferred to least preferred with their first draft writing. Those with most preferred ratings become your number 1 writers for the campaign process.
A. We want you to consider how consumer buying behavior has evolved in the last few years. Think of your budget decisions—the risk of spending too much, the risk of spending too little, and how strategic content marketing is your greatest asset. And acknowledge that achieving new growth levels requires a marketing budget that falls between a recommended 9.6% to 11.8% of revenue, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Supporting those stats, Deloitte’s Annual CMO Survey says marketing spending growth is at its highest rate in over a decade, with as much as 13.6% allocated. GROWING through content means more than just writing (keeping a journal.) It means content with a strategy behind it— content strategy, production, optimization, and analytics. Agencies with strategy have industry experience, an accumulation of knowledge between team members, tools of the trade, and a strong desire to drive results with quality content. However, agencies vary in size, service, and pricing. It boils down to your needs and budget.
Blog marketing is a content marketing strategy to address your potential customers’ pain points and offer solutions through your service or products. While not a new concept, it has evolved. Search engine optimization has become vital as search engines reward valuable, relevant content. Blogs give companies a voice and allow them to showcase their expertise and authority. Blog marketing is still a big business and it’s Responsify’s business. We help B2Bs open more revenue opportunities and develop relationships with their target audience. Marketing teams are often swamped and over-committed. We help teams develop a strategy, write content that is aligned with their brand and drive website traffic and attract leads and sales from content. We help grow your business by engaging and educating your ideal audience. Get a fresh perspective on your blog marketing with a free assessment.