Why Set Up a Company Blog?
Maintaining a company blog as part of an inbound marketing strategy can be daunting. It usually requires a lot of time, resources, and expertise, which many business owners may not have. However, making room in your budget and your schedule for a brand blog can help you attract customers and build lasting and meaningful relationships with them. In fact, brands with company blogs are likely to produce 67% more leads monthly than those without one.
Here are some benefits of running a blog for your business:
Drive consistent organic traffic to your website
You can draw potential customers to your website without relying on paid advertisements, like search ads, by running a corporate blog that hosts valuable content. While paid traffic (PPC ads) can quickly generate results, organic traffic driven by search-engine-optimized content can help you build a visitor base that will consistently build over time.
Food for thought: In a 2019 Databox survey, 70% of the marketers said that using SEO is more effective than PPC for driving online traffic, sales, and long-term growth. Some respondents even claimed that PPC efforts are only successful when SEO fundamentals are already in place.
Users who land on your blog organically are probably already searching for the solution you’re offering. Their visit to your blog is intentional, and they may already be interested in your product or service. This makes it easier to convert organic site visits into leads.
Build brand credibility
When you produce content that offers solutions to your prospect’s problems or pain points, you generate interest in your company. Your blog can also serve as a resource, not just for your target market but also for your industry. This, in turn, can prompt different sites to feature a link to your blog, further increasing visits and leads for your site.
With strategic content creation and consistency in blogging for business, you can showcase your category expertise and develop your brand equity. This will help encourage your readers to trust your brand, engage with your content, and try your product or service.
Retains current customers
For any business, customer retention is just as important as the acquisition, especially since it can increase profits by 25% to 95%. Setting up a corporate blog with content that regularly provides solutions and value to your customers, you can continually stimulate their interest, keep your brand top-of-mind, and foster brand loyalty.
How to Assess Your Brand’s Blog Performance
An inbound marketing strategy doesn’t end with content creation. Once you’ve published your blog posts, you would need to measure and monitor your blog’s performance using the right metrics. This will help you update and further optimize your content strategy and uncover opportunities for more effective content creation and promotion.
Here are some of the crucial metrics for evaluating your blog performance:
Visits
The number of organic visitors on your site is a good indicator of your blog’s performance. The more qualified visitors you have, the more visible your site and your brand will be. When tracking organic traffic, it’s a good idea to also monitor which posts or pages get the most visits. This will help you identify the factors (topic, keywords used, structure, etc.) that make these posts attractive.
However, fixating on how to drive traffic to your blog may keep you from seeing the bigger picture. It’s important to track other metrics to analyze how your blogging efforts affect your business results.
Leads
While boosting site traffic is good, generating leads is even better. Getting people to visit your page is just an initial step. Engaging them and prompting them to express interest in your brand is what would take a customer further towards business growth.
Keep in mind that even if some posts don’t get a lot of visitors, they can still generate leads. This is why it’s not enough to simply track the overall amount of leads your site achieves. It would also be helpful to monitor the number of leads each content piece obtains. Lead monitoring platforms, such as Google Analytics, can help you see and analyze the lead-generating performance of your site and of each article.
Food for thought: One of the ways to increase lead generation is to include a call-to-action (CTA) button on your posts or at the sidebar. Depending on the nature of your business, this may be a prompt signing up, booking an appointment, submitting quotation requests, etc.
Conversions
Conversion rate is the percentage of blog visitors who become customers. In Google Analytics, this is usually based on actions that site visitors take after reading content. This is one of the most important metrics to track, as it can give you a better idea of how effective your content is in terms of closing deals and contributing to company goals.
Newsletter subscriptions
The newsletter subscription rate is another good indicator of your blog’s consistency and quality. A subscription to your brand emails implies that you have successfully engaged your visitors and that they’re interested in receiving more content from you.
Inbound Links
Inbound links (or backlinks) from other sites can indicate how valuable your blog content is to other people. Inbound links are one of the factors that influence search engines when ranking your website. Blog posts are generally informational and are more likely to generate inbound links, which drives more traffic. Tracking inbound links can help you detect the pieces of content that serve as a resource for your site audience.
Other metrics that you can also look at are the average time visitors spend on a page, the average number of pages they visit per session, and the number of returning visitors.
Why Your Blog Is Not Bringing in Results
Even if your company has a blog, it may still perform poorly in terms of traffic or conversions. Some of the most common reasons for this are:
Lack of consistent approach
If you’re not following a regular posting schedule, your site’s visitors will find it difficult to anticipate when there will be new content. This may lead to a decline in interest, especially with the amount of content being generated on the internet every day.
Additionally, if you randomly select blog topics without a clear editorial strategy, you might find it difficult to build a dedicated readership. Consistency and relevance are two of the most important things that readers look for in blog posts.
Also, search engines tend to rank websites with sporadic updates lower than those that update regularly.
Missing SEO strategy
Even if your blog is filled with well-written articles that offer insightful information, you won’t be able to maximize the benefits of great content unless your target consumers can easily find your site. It’s important to optimize your posts for search engines so that your site can rank higher on the SERP.
Insufficient content promotion efforts
Your site won’t be visible to your target audience if you don’t promote it. In order to grow your blog, you need to have consistent and aggressive content promotion, which includes contributing guest posts to other blogs, engaging with online communities and linking back to the articles on your blog. This way, your blog will get referral traffic and gain SEO weight.
How Can a Content Marketing Agency Help Your Blog Generate Leads?
The key to a successful company blog is a sound inbound marketing strategy with a data-driven communication plan.
A reputable inbound marketing agency has a team of experts who specialize in different aspects of content marketing services. Here are the ways in which a content marketing agency can assist you:
Run a content audit of your blog
Mischka agency can help analyze your blog, identify the posts that are performing well and those that need improvement, and derive insights about audience preferences. Once we’ve finished running a content audit, we’ll formulate an insight-based inbound marketing plan that’s specifically tailored to your needs.
Implement a keyword strategy
To help you optimize your blog for search engines and enable your content to rank on top of the Google search page, we’ll perform thorough keyword research and craft a growth-focused keyword strategy for your blog.
Identify your buyer personas
Buyer personas are representations of your target customers. These personas factor in various information, like age, occupation, location, interests, pain points, and goals. By distinguishing the behavior and the needs of your buyer personas, we’ll have a better understanding of the type of content that your audience would find valuable.
Define specific areas of expertise
For your blog to have a distinct identity, your message, mission, and goals need to be clearly defined. We can help you determine these and make sure that they permeate through any content piece on your corporate blog.
Introduce a solid editorial plan
Since timely and relevant content is important in building a significant readership for your blog, we’ll prepare a strategic content plan. This can help keep your blog engaging and relevant.
Consistent content creation
Blogs that regularly publish content have a better chance of driving traffic to their site. With this in mind, we’ll make sure that content production is consistent and strictly adheres to a clearly defined plan. The content will also be optimized for search engines.
Link-building and content promotion strategy
In order to drive targeted referral traffic to your corporate blog, we’ll be implementing a link-building and content promotion strategy. This includes engagement with other blogs and online communities, with the goal of increasing your blog’s visibility and domain authority.
Performance assessment
To see how effective strategies are in meeting business goals, we’ll be conducting a regular performance evaluation. This will help us identify the key strengths so that we can capitalize on them.
An inbound marketing agency can help you understand where to start with content marketing and what strategies need to be implemented.
Conclusion
Setting up and maintaining a company blog is an effective way to increase traffic and generate leads, especially if you know how to maximize the platform. To run and successfully generate leads with a company blog, you would need a consistent and strategic approach.
By having an inbound marketing strategy in place, you can turn your business blog into a powerful tool for lead generation and conversion. It might be helpful to enlist the services of an established content marketing agency to aid you in crafting and implementing a data-based inbound marketing plan.
