Blogging is an important part of content marketing. Content marketing itself falls under the category of digital marketing. Digital marketing is the single most effective way of marketing in the current era.
So, by joining the dots, we can understand that blogging is ultimately an important part of digital marketing.
Traditional marketing methods such as cold calling and door-to-door salesmen are becoming obsolete. The internet is the new playground of marketing.
Content marketing is the strategy of using content - which includes blogs, copies, newsletters, etc. - to increase brand awareness and drive more sales. It is an incredibly effective method as it has several benefits with virtually no drawbacks.
Online shopping has more or less become the norm. Especially due to the long periods of lockdown during the pandemic, people had no choice but to shop online. The convenience provided by online shopping is so much that people choose that over physically shopping.
As a result, content marketing has become more relevant than ever. Today we are going to discuss how blogs can positively affect marketing and sales.
How Blogs Affect Your Sales and Marketing
1. Blogs Increase Awareness/Exposure
Content marketing relies on using content and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so that the website hosting that content shows up in the top results of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
SEO involves targeting keywords and writing content related to those keywords. Keywords are basically the terms people use to search for things.
For example, “Denim Jacket” is a keyword because people looking to buy denim jackets will just type that in the search bar.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Blogs are one of the most effective ways of targeting keywords and creating content related to those keywords. If written and optimized well for SEO, blogs can help the brand’s website to show up on the first page and possibly in the top five results.
This increases the exposure of the brand to the public. People who were not aware of your brand will get to know about it through your blog. Once they start reading the blog and get to know about your products and services, it will increase their awareness.
Awareness is the first step in creating and converting leads…which is the ultimate goal of marketing.
- Blogs Can Garner Trust in the Audience with Unique Content
Awareness alone is not good enough to convert leads. Once you have made people aware of your brand, you need to appeal to them that your company has what they need.
This can be done with unique content. Content uniqueness is dependent on a lot of things. But there is one thing that is not tolerated by customers at all. And that is reused/plagiarized content.
Reading the same thing that a viewer may have already read before is terribly boring and off-putting. Using plagiarized content is also bad for SEO since search engines can detect it. They can penalize sites using duplicated content by reducing their SERPs ranking or worse, by removing them from their index.
As a marketer, that is antithetical to your goal. Blogs should never host plagiarized content.
A great way to detect plagiarism in content is to use a plagiarism checker. Plagiarism checkers are online tools that can detect and portray the exact amount of plagiarism found in your content. Most tools also show the exact parts that are plagiarized.
Using this information, you can remove or edit those parts to make sure that your content contains no duplication.
When your audience will read unique and helpful content on your blog, they will start trusting your brand. And when someone trusts a brand, they are more than likely to buy from them instead of competitors.
3. Blogs Can Drive Sales with Masterfully Written CTAs
CTA stands for Call-to-Action. CTAs are little pieces of content sprinkled throughout your blog post in various shapes and forms. These ask the audience to sign up for a service or buy a product from you.
CTAs, if well written and designed, can boost sales dramatically. In fact, according to review42.com, text-based CTAs increase conversion rates by 120%.
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
CTAs can be present in the blog content or they can be near the start or the end as separate entities. A great CTA needs to be masterfully written and it should be easy to understand
You can use a paraphrasing tool to increase the readability of a text-based CTA. Paraphrasers can also inspire you to write more creatively by showing you different ways of saying the same thing.
When it comes to the designing part of CTAs, services such as Strikingly - which let you create websites using templates - provide some great designs. Using the Strikingly website designer, you can create a blog and put beautifully crafted CTAs in it to drive sales.
4. Blogs Can Advertise New Products and Services
Blogs are used in content marketing, that is much we all know. Among other purposes, they can be used to provide guides and information on how to use or troubleshoot products and services.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Similarly, they can also be used for marketing. Promotional blogs are not uncommon and people are known to sponsor blogs in order to promote their brands.
Advertising, in the end, is part of marketing. Brands can use their own blogs to advertise their own products. This is especially applicable when they need to introduce a new product or service.
Using a blog that is reputable and has a sizeable readership is great for advertising products related to that blog’s niche. That’s because people trust blogs that they read regularly. And when a trusted source endorses something, people are more receptive to it.
5. Blogging Can Give You Better ROI
Blogging as we have already established is used for content marketing. And it has been proven through data that content marketing has a great ROI (Return on Investment).
ROI is the amount of profit generated by a marketing campaign. Content marketing has great ROI because it requires almost no investment. You do not need to spend money on advertising or hosting/sponsoring events to advertise your product/service.
All you need is a website, an SEO team, and a writing team. Compare this to the teams you need for hosting an event and the costs associated with it. You would need to rent a hall, hire some caterers, and interior decorators. All of these costs are extra money.
According to “demandjump.com” content marketing costs 62% less than conventional marketing but converts three times more leads. That is a massive saving in investment.
Since businesses are all about creating a profit efficiently, content marketing (and by extension blogging) is a great way to do that. It will take a huge load of your marketing budgeting which can be either saved or used somewhere else.
6. Blogging Enables Behavioral Targeting
Blogs are considerably more personal and specific compared to conventional marketing methods. People love it when they feel they are being spoken to. That’s why blogs are usually written in a conversational style.
You can observe the behavior of your readership on your blog, such as what kind of posts they are interested in, and what kind of CTA’s they act on or ignore. This behavior can be used to set up audience personas that allow you to engage your readership using behavioral targeting.
You can also use this information to better streamline the kind of content you provide to your audience. People like it when they feel understood and behavioral targeting is literally just that i.e., understanding your audience.
Blogs are a marketing gold mine in this regard. You can further drive sales using CTAs specifically tailored for certain audience personas.
7. Direct Customer Feedback
Previously we mentioned observing the behavior of your readers and creating audience personas based on that data. However, there is another way blogs allow you to learn what your audience like.
Traditionally, all blogs have a comments section. At the end of a blog post, you can encourage your readers to leave behind some comments detailing what they liked, disliked, or would like to see more of.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
A lot of people tend to engage the brand in the comments especially when they are encouraged to do so. This direct feedback is much more valuable than any deductive information or assumptions that you can make using their behavioral data.
Acting on the feedback that you get from your audience will give them the most satisfaction. A satisfied audience becomes loyal to your brand and they can even do some advertising for you free of cost. They may recommend your brand to their friends and family as well as colleagues in the workplace.
This will ultimately drive more sales and act as a passive source of marketing for your brand.
Conclusion
These were seven ways in which blogs affect your marketing and sales.
Blogging is a great method of content marketing. High-quality content paired with good SEO can make a blog reach the top results in the SERPs, which is the ideal place for online advertisement.
Users trust the top results in search engines and any website present there automatically enters that fold. A trusted blog can use creatively written CTAs to drive sales and convert leads.
It can also be used to obtain behavioral data on the brand’s audience and then provide them with advertisements about services/products that they are more receptive to.
Similarly, blogs can be used to obtain direct feedback from readers. By acting on that feedback, you can generate brand loyalty among your audience.
Content marketing costs less than half of traditional marketing methods, as such, it has great ROI and long-term benefits.
Create your own blog at Strikingly using their free CMS (Content Management System). Using the helpful tutorials presented on their site you can make a proper blog by yourself in no time at all.
