“No matter what your business is, always remember that someone is on the other end. And if you can show them a little bit of who you are, what sets your company apart or why your product is different, we think it goes a really long way.”
Dan Mills, VP of marketing at wistia
For the record, it is possible to generate leads and increase conversions without incorporating blog content into your marketing strategy. We know because we’ve received a healthy inflow of client inquiries by simply ranking on page 1 for 17 B2B copywriting keywords for more than 12 months using landing page SEO alone.
But there comes a point where growing your SEO score using nothing but landing page copy becomes unsustainable. Especially when time spent tweaking the copy to match keywords could be better spent building other parts of the website instead! But don’t get us wrong. While we’ve had to bite the bullet and start churning out blogs, we definitely don’t do this begrudgingly. We know that blogging presents a handy opportunity for businesses to sell consistently.
Think about it. No matter how your large customer service and sales teams are, you will always reach a point of critical mass where all of your agents are engaged at once. Moreover, customer service interactions are a one and done deal. Once the call ends, you’ll have to start the sales process all over again with the next client, and the next client. The process quite literally never ends.
Blogging, on the other hand, leaves a legacy. It keeps a record of your best ideas in a form that can be easily distributed on social media and mobile devices, allowing you to jump straight to the point on sales calls. And once you’ve built up a large enough following, your readers may even start sharing what you’ve written, bringing clients directly to you rather than the other way around.
Blogging is the ultimate passive traffic booster
Marketers report a 45% traffic increase when their
total number of blog posts increased from 20 to 50.
Every time you hit publish, your blog grows by one indexed page. As your blog assets increase, so does the number of entry points into your websites. That means you’ll be covering a much wider scope of search queries, giving your website a greater shot at showing up on SERPs (search engine results pages) whenever someone types their question into Google.
More importantly, writing a blog puts you in the vicinity of where B2B buyers are: doing research. 57-70% of B2B buyers will trawl the internet to sniff out their options before contacting sales. If your blogs are shared on social media, even better! This may surprise you, but a shocking 94% of millennial B2B buyers conduct their research on social media. What this means for you, the B2B marketer, is that sales pitches start way before you pick up the phone. By not writing a blog, you’re basically sitting out of the fight for potential B2B clients way beyond the half time mark.
Blogging gives your B2B brand much needed personality
We can hear some of you protesting already. If blogging is so effective, then why does the average blog post of 1150 words receive just a mere 16 seconds of viewership?
This Gartner survey might shed some light on the matter.
According to their results, 90% of B2B customers already feel that information provided by B2B companies is already solid. More tellingly, 55% of them felt that the information available was relatively undifferentiated. In other words, the bulk of B2B marketing content is pretty much identical to one another. B2B marketers have boxed themselves in with self-imposed rules for too long. In a bid to sound professional, they end up becoming plain and clinical instead.
The result of all that effort spent creating standard, run-off-the-mill B2B blog posts puts companies on equal footing with their competitors, not ahead of them. But the good news is that the solution is really not that complicated. No, it’s not writing or posting more frequently to beat the algorithm. You want your blogs to work for you, not the other way around. It’s putting yourself in the shoes of your customer and giving them a reason to come to your website.
Take all the information out there that is flooding their senses and compile it in a way that is not just digestible, but leads them to the solution that your company can provide. The way to introduce flow into your copywriting is by telling a story. Let your customers visualise how your solutions can solve their problem, and you’ll build a reputation as a trustworthy, reliable source of information that they can trust with a major purchase.
The best time to start blogging was yesterday
And the second best time is now.
Everyday, over 4.4 million blogs are published to the internet. But you can easily cut through that noise by hiring SEO-trained copywriters who know how to write for both Google’s algorithm and human eyes. As self-certified word geeksTM, Etymon’s content writers can take the most clinical tech, finance, and B2B products and transform them into something that gets mouse clicks and people talking.
So if you’d like to save yourself time, energy, and a concussion from banging your head against the wall trying to come up with an effective content strategy, drop us a note, or send us an email at hello@etymon.com.sg.