Blogging is a simple element that can have a major impact on the performance of your inbound marketing campaign. If you doubt the legitimacy of this claim, consider these statistics from Hubspot:
- 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing
- 43% of marketers obtained a customer via their blog this year
- 82% of marketers who blog daily, and 57% of marketers who blog monthly, acquired a customer using their blog
This conveys a simple message. First, if you're not blogging, you're completely neglecting a potential goldmine of prospective buyers. And second, blogging can be an awesome lead generation tool and an invaluable component of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
But that's only true if you're doing it right. Anybody can blog, but not everyone can blog effectively. Let's go over some ways you can optimize your blog and make it work for your inbound marketing campaign.
1) Promote Your Offers
I like to think of a blog as the very top of the top-of-the-funnel. This doesn't necessarily mean that your blog is the first area of your site that a prospective buyer visits (or even what attracted them to you), but it's a tool that has great potential to pique their interest. Blogs allow you to cover a wide variety of topics in a cursory manner, which hopefully will elicit further interest from readers. And you can make it easy for readers to act on this interest by providing a call-to-action graphic, directing them to other related content.
2) Conduct Keyword Research
Obviously your blog won't produce the results you desire in terms of traffic, reach and impact if you don't employ an SEO strategy. You need to conduct keyword research to determine what search terms and phrases are most relevant to your industry and to your target audience. That way you'll not only direct traffic to your website, but ensure that it's the right kind of traffic.
3) Create Powerful, Valuable Content
Not every blog post is going to be your magnum opus, and that's not what you should strive for. You should, however, aim to consistently produce content that is high-quality and of value to your audience. As mentioned before, your blog provides you a great chance to attract prospects and direct them to other useful content; but that won't happen if they don't find your initial content offer valuable.
What methods do you use to optimize your blog? Share them in the comments.
This is the 7th instalment in our 9-part series, The Key Elements of an Inbound Marketing Campaign.
Daniel, How can I “conduct keyword research to determine what search terms and phrases” as the Google Keyword Tool has disappeared. Thanks.