The Importance of a Blog to Your Company’s Marketing Strategy

To blog or not to blog … if that is the question your company is asking, then your inbound marketing strategy needs a tune-up.

Basically, asking if a blog is important for your company website is akin to asking if water is important for your new aquarium… it’s not just important, it’s essential and without it, your marketing campaign might flounder.

Blogs are the simplest of digital content – it feels like the format has been around since Steve Jobs was messing around in his garage – but the payoff can be complex from increased site traffic, increasing SEO optimization, developing customer and potential client engagement and positioning your company, brand and key personnel as industry experts and thought leaders.

“By now, most brands know that content marketing is an essential part of a company's overall strategy. A company blog presents a huge opportunity to establish your industry expertise and extend your audience reach through social sharing,” the Forbes Leadership Council wrote.

Remember that for an inbound marketing strategy to work you want to attract, engage, and delight with your digital content.

“One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for,” Lucy Alexander writes in HubSpot’s fundamental digital marketing guide “The Who, What, Why & How of Digital Marketing”.

History of Blogging

For Millennials and Gen Z blogs have been around their entire digital lives as the term was first coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997, according to a 2007 Wired magazine article.

Barger, who back then looked a bit like Forest Gump when he was running across America, made up the term “weblog” to describe a list of links from around the web that he published on his “Robot Wisdom” website.

About two years later, Peter Merholz cleverly broke the word “weblog” into two words into a sidebar post on peterme.com: “For What’s Worth: I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’-blog. Or ‘blog’ for short.”

Soon Pyra Labs would bring blog and blogger, credited to Evan Williams, into the mainstream with their Blogger, and later Blogspot, products. Pyra Labs, we should note, was bought by Google in 2003, which always seems to know a developing trend.

ROI and SEO of Company Blogs

The Better Business Bureau in its February 2021 article “BBB Business Tip: Businesses that blog can see big ROI. Here are 10 tips to get started” points out two main benefits of having a company blog:

• Businesses that blog can see a 13 times return-on-investment (ROI).
• Businesses with blogs receive up to 55 percent more traffic than companies without blogs.

Both organic search and paid search can play a role in SEO for your inbound marketing.

When it comes to organic search, content from blogs is vital. SearchEngineWatch.com says that when it comes to user-focused content across the customer journey, it is no longer a “nice-to-have” but is now a “must-have” to properly rank in Google and other search engines.

User-focused content across the journey is no longer a nice-to-have for organizations, but a must-have to properly rank.

3 Key Benefits to Establishing a Company Blog

Let’s examine closer why your company should be blogging:

1. More Traffic = More Leads: When it comes to traffic nobody likes to see it on their commutes but on their websites, they want to see plenty of traffic. Blog articles indexed by search engines will generate traffic to your website, and if the content is valuable enough, then it will be shared on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, which will lead to more traffic to your website. Every good blog post will have a call-to-action or CTA so that traffic generated by your blog will ultimately lead to traffic that can be converted into leads for your product or services.
   
   
2. Establishes You as Thought-Leader: Consumers and B-2-B potential clients have similar needs so as to be able to trust the company, brand, or product they might do business with. A company blog can establish you as a thought-leader in your industry or field. The more content you offer that is useful to potential customers and clients, the more likely they are to establish a relationship with you.
   
   
3. Long-Term Results: The disadvantage of the paid campaigns that companies execute for marketing is that once the campaign ends, the benefits end. Your pay-for-click search ads go away when you stop paying. Blog content, however, can have long-term results and most businesses should be looking at the long game when it comes to their success.

HubSpot says: “In fact, about 70 percent of the traffic each month on this very blog comes from posts that weren't published in the current month. They come from old posts. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month -- about 90 percent of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts that were published in previous months. Sometimes years ago.”

We are passionate about this and we know it to be true through numerous real-world examples with our clients. Good content, consistently published on your website will bring the traffic you need.

Contact adWhite today to find out how consistent, helpful, and relevant content as part of an inbound marketing strategy can help draw the right visitors to your company.