If you are running a business, you might be wondering if blogging ‘often’ is worth your time and money! The answer is “YES’’.
There was a time when businesses derived traffic only from search engines, but no longer. Ever since the time blogging came into the marketing scenario, it has become a bang on idea for businesses. The more the frequency of blogging, the more the traffic and leads.
Marketers in India are increasing investment in digital marketing year on year. While social media marketing and email marketing are bringing in great returns, research says that almost 57% of India’s brands are blogging because it too is bringing in good returns. (Source: Digital Marketing report India, 2016, Socialbeat) Moreover blogs have a very long shelf life, they can come up in search even months and years after they are published.
While numbers are not available for just blogs, however, Blogs and Newsletters together were found to be the most effective content marketing tools in India. When asked, ‘how do you deploy Content Marketing for your business,’ 68% replied blog and newsletters
Blogging in India has become one of the most effective content marketing tools. Blogs and newsletters saw a considerable rise of 11% among India marketers.
(Source: Digital by Default 2017, Octane Research)
If you are still in doubt about launching your company blog, or blogging more often, here are a few reasons that will inspire you enough to start blogging.
Traffic matters
Like any other business initiative, your company blog must also give you results. Otherwise, why would we be even talking about business blogging? Here are a few statistics from Hubspot that will give you some perspective on the power of blogging:
B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month.
B2C companies that blogged 11 times or more got more than 4X more leads than those that publish only 4-5 posts per month
(Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics, 2017)
The graph above gives a fair idea of how often you should be blogging to get more traffic. The more frequently you blog, the more you will reap its benefits. Reaching out to your audience through this organic method to get more traffic, before planning paid promotions.
If you could generate almost 3 times the leads of your competitors by publishing blogs more often, would you not do it?
Long-term traffic matters even more
One of the best things about blogs is that they never get old. The blog topics that you publish on your website can come up in search results, even months later. If relevant, they will be visited and read by people months later, and even years. Unlike social media posts, they aren’t forgotten in a short span of time.
Blogs are your content marketing hub
Content is still the king! If you wish to be found online, your business blog can go a long way in building your brand as it’s a great format to publish fresh, ongoing and relevant content. Blogs have the power to augment social media, support search optimization and drive traffic to your website. Whether you are a small company or a Fortune 500 company, you ought to be including blogs at the heart of your content marketing plan.
68% of companies in India use blogs as a part of their effective content marketing strategy.
(Source: Digital Marketing Industry Report, 2016, Social Beat)
Don’t you think it’s time you relied much more on blogs as your content marketing companion?
More Conversation, More Engagement, More Sales
Blogs form top-of- funnel content and is an excellent platform to start a conversation with your target prospect and provide them with the relevant information they need. Would you not love to get people into the buying cycle quickly, and shorten the sales cycle of your business? After all, your objective is to increase sales by engaging customers very often.
In India, Blogs and newsletters maximize customer engagement by 10%
(Source: Octane Research)
Social media is the best way to reach out to customers and blogs are a form of social media. Social sharing, comments and blog posts provide the basis for building an engaged community. Here’s research showing that blogs top other forms of social media in terms of engagement and effectiveness.
Excited to start using blog as a form of social media to reach out to a wide audience?
It’s all about getting leads
Every time you blog, you create an opportunity for others to engage with you and trust you as a brand.
Good content builds the factor of trust and loyalty. The more often you publish valuable content, the more your leads will skyrocket. Buyers will visit your website and send you an inquiry.
When you are constantly engaging with prospects and buyers, they develop a sense of trust with you and you are contributing towards making a sale and helping them make better-informed decisions.
Here’s a research statistic from Hubspot:
“B2B marketers who use blogs get 67% more leads than those who don’t”
Establish authority
If your blogs address the why’s, the hows, trends and best practices and offers useful information to your prospects, they are going to start believing in you. Even during the sales process, if your prospect asks a question related to your services or industry, and if you can send him your blog in response, imagine the impact of that.
The provider of useful information at the right time, builds trust and authority.
Links are important
When you create useful and informative blogs, people share these blogs on their websites or social platforms, and give you more reach and even more inbound links to your website. Just having a blog isn’t enough; you should be putting out informative news so that people share it, and it increases your reputation, as well as your inbound links.
Company websites with active blogs receive 97% more inbound links then websites without blogs
(Source: Business Blogging, 2015, HubSpot)
Here’s a round-up of the benefits of blogging:
- Boost SEO
- Get traffic to website over a long period
- Better quality leads
- Customers trust and loyalty
Inspired much by reading these statistics and benefits? When are you going to make blogging a priority for your B2B business? How often are you going to blog and move ahead of your competitors?
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