Fact: Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors.
Fact: B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads per month than those who don’t blog.
Blogging is clearly a great way to put your company’s expertise on display while boosting your engagement with the customers and prospects you want to reach.
Blogging may seem passé given everyone’s focus on social media. But blogging offers many benefits that social media cannot, including the ability to tell a story, search engine optimization for your website, and the aforementioned customer engagement.
Plus, rather than viewing social media as a replacement for blogging, consider the value of integrating the two efforts. Social media is the tool for getting eyeballs onto you blogs, and blogging gives you a legitimate reason for social media posts.
The nuts and bolts of blogging:
- Identify your goals from the outset. Inform clients? Generate leads? Both? Setting clear goals will help formulate content and strategy.
- Blog frequently and consistently. There is no exact rule of thumb for frequency, but we recommend at least two blog posts per week. And try to post on the same days each week so your audience knows when to expect information from you.
- Think like your clients. What problems are they having? Where are their pain points? How can your information help? Just musing about what to eat for lunch is not what your customers want to read.
- Create a sense of urgency and call to action for the reader. Give them a sense that they can take what they have read and make it actionable. One of those actions could be buying your product or using your service—but don’t make every post a sales pitch.
- Finding content is easily the biggest challenge for most companies, but the solution may be more obvious than you think. Start by doing an internal audit of content your company already has that could be repurposed for blog posts (newsletter stories, technical services bulletins, education presentations, etc.). Otherwise you may hire an outside writer to help with the content. (Read our Case Study on developing content for Agro Liquid).
- Put together an editorial schedule to help you stay on track and blog consistently. Blogging is hard work and you will not see results immediately. But, over time, the traffic to your blog will grow and deliver a definite ROI.
The author is Director of eMedia for Meister Media. For more information regarding how Meister can help you with your blogging efforts, contact him at [email protected] or 440-602-9171.