How to use blogs as an effective marketing tool
by Paola Limin
Crafting a digital marketing strategy doesn’t end with one specific approach. In fact, among the many ways you can promote your brand is through blogging. With professional marketers and industry leaders considering blogs as a vital channel, it’s no wonder why new business owners rush to learn the tricks of the trade.
But before you get excited, you must know that exploring techniques on how to use blogs as an effective marketing tool involves understanding its roots. In this article, we’ll dive directly into that to give you helpful insights about this lucrative venture.
What is Blog Marketing?
According to Hubspot, blogging is one of the most common forms of content marketing. However, despite its raging popularity, not many know its exact purpose and how it came to be as it is now. While creating blogs originally rose as online diaries in the 1990s, innovative entrepreneurs recognized its relevance and eventually used this format to update customers about their offerings and industry trends.
The primary purpose of blog marketing is to appeal to a specific target audience through blogging noteworthy and authentic content that supports your business identity and value in the current market. Generally, there are three types of blogs your brand can leverage in terms of marketing and revenue. Let’s discuss them one by one.
Business Blogs
If your brand has been operating for the longest time, one of the wisest alternatives to enhance your online presence is running a business blog alongside it. The concept of these blog posts must align with your brand’s current market to attract potential leads.
Considering that there are around 7 million blog posts published every single day, you have to make sure that your content can convince visitors to subscribe to your mailing list for more updates about your business. Blogging about business topics is more technical than you think, so it’s best to talk about subject matters that you’re well-versed in.
Niche Blogs
Unlike business blogs, writing content for niche blogs can be specific and limits itself to topics directly related to the industry where your brand operates. Some entrepreneurs start their blogging journey through niche blogs. Providing content solutions to their potential customers often leads them to be an industry leader and generate revenues in the long run.
The most crucial thing about crafting these types of blogs is finding the niche you’re passionate about. So if you’re a budding business professional with a desire to brand yourself as a solution provider, you must properly define your target market through industry age groups, preferences, and demographics.
Affiliate Blogs
Many affiliate blogging program techniques are popular among established businesses. They tend to reach out to other companies or trustworthy brands to generate traffic and/or sales for them by providing insights and reviews about their offered products and services.
This type of content gives your target audience a new perspective on the brand. It also generates awareness and stirs interest among potential customers, which will lead them to check out more of your company through a redirected link provided in the said affiliate blog post.
Photo by John Schnobrich in Unsplash
Benefits of blogging to promote your brand
1. Cost-effective Marketing Tool
If we’re talking about costs, creating a blog will give you a run for your money. All you need to do is purchase a domain name and web hosting services (if you don’t have one yet). From there, you can customize your blog marketing framework and lay out content in accordance with your business goals and target market.
According to D. John Carlson, a marketing strategist, 82% of online consumers determine your brand image through the content they read on your platform. In this newly built blog, you can find a new voice to connect your audience with up-to-date information, trends, and all the things that happen behind your brand that can put your company in a different light.
2. Increases Market Engagement
With 77% of users on the web regularly reading blogs, it’s not surprising how companies with blog marketing strategies leverage greater lead generation and market engagement than those who don’t use this kind of approach. You may not be aware, but some consumers prefer to learn about your brand from a blog than a paid advertisement.
Besides that, you can repurpose a blog post in other channels and allow the content to converse with a broader audience. As a long-term marketing tool, you can initiate engagement by sharing your blog content through different distribution approaches.
3. Establish Industry Credibility
By creating a platform where you offer more solutions than questions, your brand’s blogging venture will slowly establish your place in the industry. With the two-way conversation opportunities, your target audience will have confidence in your business and will allow you to showcase your expertise beyond available and static resources online.
4. Boosts Search Visibility & Conversion Opportunities
While it’s common knowledge that blogs should be rich in content, these resources cannot be an effective marketing tool without the use of proper keywords. Once you successfully crafted blogs with words related to your brand, search engines will immediately pick up on these new pieces of content and connect your company website to a broader audience with queries similar to your chosen topic.
By integrating various Search Engine Optimization practices in your blog marketing strategy, your brand will surely reach a highly targeted audience and boost chances of conversion.
Tips on creating an effective blog marketing strategy
- Identify your goals and target market
When crafting any business strategy, you need to ask yourself a few questions before embarking on the venture. In blogging, you must clearly define the goals you intend to achieve before proceeding to content creation.
Through conducting market research, you’ll be able to find out what kind of content you need. Is it to bring revenue and generate leads or to build credibility? Does your audience have specific content they prefer reading? You also need to set definite standards when achieving these goals, such as how much traffic/sales you’re expecting and the timeframe of running your blog marketing campaign.
- Select topic ideas and keywords
Unless there’s no rhyme or reason to your keyword research, you need to know which opportunities will take the least amount of your limited resources to yield the highest ROI. — Neil Patel, NeilPatel.com
As previously stated, the value of your blog content relies on the relevance of your topic ideas and keywords. As long as you find trending industry-related keywords and use them to curate excellent blog posts, the chances of ranking in search engines and generating Return On Investment (ROI) are high because most search engines highly encourage new content.
Keep in mind that the primary goal of these engines is to provide their users with credible information, so proper selection of topics should still be your highest priority to give your brand more credibility.
- Organize and schedule your content
In any content creation process, it’s essential to be organized and prompt to build an excellent and well-constructed output. Having a calendar to align your content with the changing trends and track every detail in your blog helps avoid launching a half-baked idea that’ll potentially damage your brand’s credibility.
- Repurpose your blog content
It’s not a secret that every piece of content you put out for your brand has a lifespan. However, did you know that single blog content can be repurposed in ample ways, such as newsletters, social media posts, and other channels? Considering that an average blog post takes almost 4 hours to write, it’s only natural that we make the most out of these materials to expand the brand’s market reach.
Summary
Although it can be enticing to dive into blogging right away, keep in mind that every marketing tool can only be effective when proper strategy and goals are set accordingly. If you have second thoughts about integrating this approach with your brand, you can always consult industry experts to aid you and secure more success in this venture, or use SEO Copilot to create fruitful digital efforts and campaigns, especially in ranking up your pages faster!.
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