If you’re not blogging, you’re missing out on a competitive edge other businesses currently enjoy. Businesses that blog get 67% more leads than those that don’t.
Image source: HubSpot
Besides losing out on leads, you also lose out on sustainable web traffic and 97% more inbound links you can get which direct even more online visitors to your site.
Valuable content is a resource, not just for your target audience, but also for your industry which is why informative content like industry news and updates are good to include on your blog.
The advantage with this is that over time, and as more sites link to your valuable posts or guest posts, more potential leads are pulled towards your site without you putting in more effort to generate them.
Traditional lead generation methods aren’t as cost-effective or time-saving as blogging, especially for B2B marketers.
Blogging not only saves on overheads but also gives leads more contact with you which means you’re more likely to make a sale as you churn valuable content.
Blogs are also rated as the 5th most trusted source of information as businesses become the first to break industry news and insights making them more reputable to their visitors.
But why does a blog generate such a huge amount of leads for a business that blogs?
1. Blogs drive traffic to your business website
A business blog is a marketing tactic but also a strong lead magnet. If you think of the ways people find your website, from searching for a keyword, to simply typing your name in their browser, you already have an audience as you’re on their radar.
However, there are other methods like using paid ads to draw visitors to your site but the better ways of driving any traffic is via blogging, social media, and search engines.
Considering the number of pages on your site, you can look at how often they’re updated and see the traffic they bring – if any.
Blogging helps solve most of these problems, because each time you publish a post, it means one more indexed page for your site and a new opportunity to show up in search engines. Eventually, this drives traffic through organic search to your site.
Blogging keeps your website active which is a cue to Google and other search engines that they should check in frequently to see the new content that comes up.
Besides search engine rankings, blogging helps you get discovered through social media as you post content that is shareable on social networks. This helps expose your brand to a whole new audience you didn’t know exists.
Your blog’s content also feeds your social media channels, keeping your presence going instead of creating new content all over again for social media. Your blog can be the content repository.
This way, you strengthen your social reach with blog content and drive new visitors to your website via social channels.
2. Blogging helps convert website traffic into leads
Image source: Neil Patel
With all the traffic coming to your website via your blog and social media channels, you can convert the traffic into leads.
Each post you publish is an indexed page on search engines but also a new opportunity for lead generation through adding calls to action on each blog post.
Image source: OptinMonster
Most of these calls to action often lead to things like free whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, fact sheets, and trials. These and other content assets make people willing to share their contact information.
Image Source: Neil Patel
The steps you can take to convert traffic into leads are as follows:
- The potential lead visits your website and sees the call-to-action with a free offer
- The visitor clicks on the call-to-action and is taken to a landing page
- On the landing page is a form in which the visitor can fill in their information
- The visitor fills out the form, submits their information, and receives the offer
Calls to action have the potential of turning traffic that comes into your blog into leads for your sales and marketing team.
However, not every visitor will become a lead and this is perfectly fine as nobody converts 100 percent of their website visitors to leads.
Keep blogging and add calls to action on each published post and then set a conversion rate benchmark for your business and work towards improving this rate every month.
3. Thought Leadership
Image source: Marketing Insider Group
Not only do blogs drive traffic to your site and help convert this traffic to leads, but it also helps establish your authority.
The best blogs listen to their customers and answer their common questions, which are helpful and valuable to their target customers, establishing the business as an authority or thought leader in their eyes. Especially on a local level, that authority unlocks a lot of future business.
For sales and service executives, a business blog is a particularly handy tool as it helps clear things up for confused customers creating more impact and helping them close more deals.
While it is a fluffy metric, it is still powerful even though traffic and leads are more concrete metrics.
But you can tie the impact of blogging to being a measure of sales enablement as it presents such opportunities.
These include when prospects find answers to their queries and make more informed purchases, plus salespeople can pull information from blog archives to answer specific questions requiring in-depth explanations.
4. Blogs drive results in the long-term
Image source: HubSpot
Creating a blog post may take hours or even days depending on the complexity and length of the piece.
However, it pays in the long-term as it drives views and leads long after you publish the blog post.
According to Orbit media, fewer than 55% of bloggers report positive results from their blogging with 30% saying they get strong marketing results. This means that most business blogs actually see a return on their investment.
Each post is ranked in the search engines for days, weeks, months, and years to come which means you keep getting traffic and leads from your posts.
The effort you put in today can translate into thousands of views, sometimes millions, and leads in the long-term.
You can also monetize your blog in different creative ways like affiliate marketing through affiliate programs that pay you for referring people to products and services. This means your business blog is scalable and not confined to just your business.
As much as results may not come in the immediate or short-term, you’ll be able to rely on predictable traffic and leads over time without having to invest more.
5. Testing and Reporting
Image source: UseProof
Businesses can test out their marketing campaigns affordably through their blogs before they put in lots of money into their creation.
Besides testing, they can also use blogs to understand their buyer personas a lot better and marketers can communicate other important public relations type of content with readers.
These include press releases, product releases, updates and even event information.
There’s a better chance of getting the attention of customers for company-focused initiatives through an already built-up audience on your owned media than pitching to journalists on paid media, hoping one of them responds.
Final Thoughts
Blogging should be part of your content strategy, focusing on creating valuable, in-depth content that answers customers’ questions.
Spend time on your blog, maintaining, refining, and improving your posts for quality and SEO consistently, and you’ll have enviable organic traffic and experience business growth.
It’s a golden opportunity to generate traffic, convert it to leads, and finally to customers.
