Blogs: The gift that keeps on giving

Blogs are some of the hardest working content around. They’re versatile with the ability to engage prospects and customers at any point in their decision making process. They educate, inform and entertain. They’re interactive – inviting comment, provoking thought and if you get them right, sharable. But above all, they’re personal. By people for people.

With these numerous benefits, it’s easy to see why key-word rich content in the form of a blog is one of the most powerful strategies for attracting visitors and converting leads. Rather than an after-thought or a nice to-do, blogs should be a consistent core to a content strategy.

Reasons why blogs are credible ways of building out a marketing or content strategy: they drive traffic to your website; on average companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website than those who don’t, they help to convert visitors into warm business leads, and they boost your authority. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not.

Here are a few ways to make your content work harder for you.

Blogs should be discoverable. If it can’t be found when someone searches for a topic, it won’t be read. So the first step is to properly optimise posts for search engines. Key to this is using relevant ‘long tail’ keywords in the blog title and copy. Make sure you have good meta titles and descriptions that include your keywords and fit within search engine character limits (generally, 60 characters for titles and 160 characters for meta descriptions).  The average word count of top-ranking content (in Google) is between 1,140-1,285 words so make sure yours is up there.

Make some noise. Make it as easy as possible to be found by getting your blogs in front of the people you’re trying to reach by promoting them via social media. And if your blog content doesn’t date, remember to continue re-purposing and promoting it beyond the initial publication date.. Think about the platforms you’re using to publish the blog– i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and use relevant hashtags to make it accessible to an even wider audience. To engage this audience, populate the meta description with enticing words and phrases that directly relate to the content to draw readers in.  And don’t forget the importance of images; blog articles with visuals get 94% more views than those who do not. When you do this, blogs really are the gift that keeps on giving.

Keep it regular.  47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales person. (Demand Gen Report, 2016), so keep at it.  Posting regular informative content which is trusted and knowledgeable will ensure you get repeat visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not, so it really is worth putting aside time in your week to research and write.

Lastly, content should be entertaining and useful, don’t just create content for the sake of it – when readers are entertained or educated, it’s adding value. If not, its just extra noise we will filter out.  Many companies now have quality content-creators, either in-house or within their agency, who are capable and often delighted to quickly and simply edit a rough draft, or put spoken words to paper.

If you’d like to make your blogs and content work harder, get in touch: sallytarbit@theteam.co.uk