Inbound Marketing Insights

The central focus of your inbound marketing strategy should be blogging and creating new and engaging content. New blogs will help new visitors find your website online, give a reason for your existing contacts to revisit your website, and provide you with relevant content to share on your social media channels and in your emails. If you are a consultant, a small business, or a multinational organization, blogging should be an integral part of your inbound strategy. Here are 3 reasons why you need to add blogging to your inbound marketing program.

1. Drive Traffic to Your Website:
Your website is one of the first places that prospects visit to research your business, get information on your products or services, and see how you may be able to help them. For this reason, your website needs to provide enough helpful content to deliver your message to potential prospects and customers. Your blog allows you to create relevant and engaging content that drives visitors to your website and re-engages them with additional unique content to pull prospects through the decision-making process. While your pages on your main website navigation are great for sharing your company’s story, products, services, testimonials, and more, your blog gives you a way to share helpful content. For most of my clients, their blog drives over 70% of their first-page website visits each month. This means that the blog is the first page found when someone clicks on a website. This is because blog content gets most indexed by search engines. Your blog is helpful, answers a question, and is more engaging than a standard product or service website page.

2. Improve the Rank of Your Website:
How does blogging connect with search engine optimization (SEO)? SEO is the process of optimizing your website and your content to allow search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others to find your content quickly and easily, and share your content with others who are searching for similar topics online. Regarding search engine optimization, remember, the more unique, quality pages you have on your website, the higher your website will start to rank. This still means that the content needs to be your own, authentic content, and it needs to be meaningful and helpful for your visitors. Don’t create content for the sake of creating content.

Make sure it is quality content. In addition, each time you publish a blog article, a unique page is added to your website. Adding a new page to your website informs Google and the other search engines that you have updated your website’s content. This activity brings search engine crawlers back to your website, which will increase your ranking and improve your website’s relevance. Finally, search engines also track how long someone stays on your website, so you want them to remain engaged and visit other pages when they land on your website. A blog is the type of content that keeps individuals engaged and active on your website by continually browsing other helpful articles on your website to find more relevant content that you are sharing.

3. Increase Your Thought Leadership & Develop Customer Relationships:
Creating well-written and meaningful content is not only important for your search ranking, but it also builds your brand as a thought leader and gives you a way to create a deeper connection with your prospects and existing customers. When you continue to create relevant and helpful content that resonates with your audience, you build your brand as an industry thought leader. You can start to leverage this content by sharing it with your customers and prospects in your email database and with your followers on social media to drive traffic back to your website.

Having an active blog is an essential part of any inbound marketing program. It drives new website visitors, gives your current prospects new and helpful content, and increases your thought leadership. Regardless of the size of your organization, you need to leverage blogging to help you improve your organic website traffic, and build trust with your prospects and customers.

Are you looking for ways to optimize your inbound strategy? The book "Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy," written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. Check out the book to see how to most efficiently and effectively develop, implement, and maintain your inbound marketing strategy.