As seen in Orange County Business Watch
Blogs are powerful tools for showcasing thought, leadership and boosting website traffic. In fact, data from HubSpot, an inbound marketing company, shows that B2B companies who blog, only once or twice per month, generate 70 percent more web leads than those without a blog.
While there’s plenty of data available to demonstrate the value of a strategically written, well-optimized business blog, consistently creating high-quality content is a time-intensive process. If you decide a business blog will be a valuable addition to your company’s marketing toolkit, follow these five quick tips for optimizing ROI:
Be Strategic
By outlining goals, objectives, tactics and benchmarks at the onset, your blog can support your overall business strategy. Maintain an editorial calendar that outlines your content plan for the month ahead and be sure that the content strategy is aligned with 1 your company’s overall marketing plan and strategic business goals.
Drive Traffic
The last thing your business wants is for its blog – a lead generation tool – to be a best kept secret. Evaluate your overall marketing strategy to identify which existing marketing channels can be used to help drive readership. Further, identify how the thought leadership pieces being posted on your blog can support your sales team. For example, if a prospective client is seeking more information on a new regulation and you recently blogged about the topic, send over a link to the article as an additional touch-point. It not only showcases your industry expertise and positions you as a thought leader, but demonstrates a strong understanding of you prospective clients’ wants and needs (i.e., their buyer persona).
Engage Your Readers
Once you’ve identified how to grow your blog’s readership, it’s time to identify what action you want readers to take after consuming your content – think downloading a whitepaper for additional information, accessing an online toolkit for handy resources and contacting your company for a free consultation. Calls-to-action should appeal to audiences at various stages of the sales funnel and progressively lead towards deeper engagement with your company.
Think Visually
Did you know that 75 percent of the neurons in our brains process visual information? Which leads us to the all-important question: how can you make your blog more visual? Whether it is an infographic that synthesizes industry data and trends, an embedded video from a recent speaking engagement or custom images that strengthen your story, visuals 4 are an important tool for helping readers to connect with your content.
Analyze the Analytics
How do you know which blog content resonates most with your online audiences? By analyzing the analytics. The beauty of blogging is that there is no shortage of great data available to help inform your content strategy moving forward. Pay careful attention to which blog posts garner the most reads, generate quality inbound links and guide the most qualified leads into your sales funnel. With this data in-hand, you are ready to refine, recalibrate and optimize your ROI.
Danielle Cyr is Vice President of Integrated Marketing for Co-Communications, a full-service marketing and public relations agency with offices in Connecticut and New York
