About Content Marketing and its benefits for your business we wrote in our past blog posts, so you probably know that we are big fans of this marketing channel - because even if the ROI isn’t that palpable like it is when we talk about Email Marketing, it brings long-term results, from brand awareness to positioning, a trusted information source for potential clients and lead generation and sales.
Benefits of having a company blog
In 2020, having a company blog is no longer an option, it is a necessity. People regularly consume content in any form, especially written content, and even though videos are now the most popular when they want to learn about a particular topic, they appeal to written content, such as blog posts. The key is to understand what your customers want to hear from you, what they are interested in and what topics they want to address.
The benefits of a blog are endless, and the results will keep popping up overnight.
Add value to your customers
People want to learn new things, to be informed about topics that interest them. Whether you tell them about your product, you come up with tips & tricks for using your product/service, or you bring news from the field, your customers want to hear all these things. This way you can give them the certainty that you know what you are doing, that you are an expert in the industry and you will gain both their trust and the title of Business Leader in the industry.
Interact with your customers
You can ask them questions, bring them closer to you and understand their needs. You can even ask them what they want to hear.
Win new customers or generate leads
Content Marketing is ideal for this. After a good optimization in Google, you will become visible when potential customers will search for various things related to your business or features of your products or services. This will be the first interaction with you. Taking care that your articles seriously address topics of interest for the niche you are addressing, you will certainly increase the trust of the potential customer and, most of the time, they will take a step towards you.
Content Marketing is the key to SEO
The blog helps a lot in terms of SEO and indexing your business on Google. Due to this fact, you will be able to reach potential new customers easier and you will be able to increase your notoriety.
Checklist for a successful blog
Understand your audience
It is important to understand what the public wants to hear from you, what topics are of interest to them. You can even ask them or you can do short research to understand what is written in the industry.
Come up with new information for your audience
Bring news to your audience. Come up with new information, give them tips & tricks, explain more about your products/services and how they are used. Find the drop of novelty your audience needs and give them that.
Create a content plan
A content plan is more than necessary. Always be one step ahead. Write articles in advance and organize a list from the beginning of the month so that it can be easier for you. Take a few hours for short research and make a plan. This can save you a lot of hassle and won’t find you unprepared for another week.
Don’t forget about SEO
As we said above, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that should not be neglected, being your key to appear in the searches of your audience. When writing an article, do not neglect the title, keywords, meta description and images. Be sure to optimize all your photos to make sure you’re not making your site load faster. You can use TinyJPG to optimize images, then rename them with a title according to the topic you wrote the article about.
To learn more about what SEO means and how it can help you, here is our SEO guide for beginners.
Determine what keywords you want to use for each article
Regarding SEO, it is important to choose which keywords you want to target in your article. This will help your article to be indexed as high as possible when your audience searches for that term in a search engine. Don’t forget to include that keyword in the title, in the URL, in the image names and to appear regularly throughout the text - be careful, however: you have to include it naturally.
CTA, CTA, CTA
Don’t forget to use Call To Action! Urge your audience to take action. They can subscribe to the newsletter, contact you for more details or enter the product page.
How to find themes for articles
Google Trends
Find out what’s on-trend, what’s being searched and what’s going viral every day on Google. This is how you can adapt and use Real-time Marketing, writing an article on a popular topic (if it is of interest to your audience).
Here you can find out statistics, what Marketing strategies you can adapt to your business, you can find useful insights to write articles.
Find out what topics interest the customers in the niche in which you operate, depending on the country in which you operate. You can enter a key term, a brand or a product, and this tool will help you discover what is being searched online and what topics you can address to be of interest.
Last but not least, ask your customers, organize polls either on Instagram or Facebook and find out what they want to read.
Promote blog posts
Although a company’s blog has enormous long-term potential, it is not enough just to write articles and post them on the blog. An important role in the development of a company blog is played by Social Media Marketing, ie promoting blog articles on all channels where your target audience is present.
Don’t forget to include published articles in your Email Marketing strategy - this is how you can let your customers know that you have posted a new article.
You can also promote your articles through paid ads, taking care to target the right audience for them.
Content Marketing is a necessity and should not be neglected by a business at the beginning of the road, but by a big business. It can help you both to retain existing customers and to attract new customers.
We hope this article has helped you understand the benefits of Content Marketing and that you are now ready to start a blog section on your website. But if you need help with drawing up a strategy or someone to help you write articles, you can leave us a message on hello@marketiu.com and we will be happy to help you! :)
