Many of our clients ask us about the importance of content marketing and whether they should consider starting a blog. Our answer is always a resounding yes.
Not only is consistent content marketing integral for search engine optimization and achieving a higher search ranking, but it’s also a great way to position your business as an expert resource to customers.
However, distributing content is more important than writing content. In fact, promoting a blog can often take more time than writing the actual content. This is particularly true for businesses who do not have a corporate team of writers and marketers on hand.
To make the blog worth the time and effort of your team, it’s critical to distribute the content effectively and obtain as much use from the blog as possible. For example, a single blog post can be shared on Twitter with a snappy headline, extended to Instagram with an engaging image, and adapted to a shareable infographic.
Below are a few ways you can get the most bang for your blog:
Write an In-Depth Blog
The first step is to start by writing an in-depth blog on a topic pertaining to your business or buyer persona’s needs. Research your customers’ pain points and choose topics that will answer their most pertinent questions. Try to keep in mind what your customers are searching for online so that you can position your organization as a trusted resource.
The length of your blog will depend on your buyer persona. HubSpot recommends a post length of 2,100 words with a title under 60 characters. Research by serpIQ indicates the top 10 Google search results are between 2,032 and 2,416 words.
However, we found that for our busy persona — marketing professionals within commercial real estate and adjacent industries — the sweet spot is between 700 and 1,000 words. The key for your business is to research your persona and conduct interviews to learn what type and length of content is most valuable.
Email Marketing
Now that you have your blog written, edited, and ready to go, it’s time to share away! If you don’t already have an email newsletter, now is the time to do so. HubSpot offers great email marketing tools and checklists for getting started.
Like your RSS Feed, you should encourage your website visitors to subscribe to your email list. Once you capture those email addresses, you can send out monthly newsletters that feature your most relevant blog posts and drive traffic back to your website.
Social Sharing Is Caring
One of the biggest perks of social media as a marketing channel is the ability to create an engaged, online community of the individuals that build up your target audience. Be sure to share all of your blogs through your social accounts. Write a one- or two-line teaser that will encourage them to click on the link and include a blog graphic to give your audience a visual representation.
Don’t forget to invest some of your marketing dollars on Facebook ads and boosting. Paid advertisement distribution on Facebook is fairly simple to use and necessary in today’s social-savvy world. Digital marketing is difficult when organic reach on Facebook decreases, so use paid distribution to your advantage.
Content Syndication
It’s important to build relationships with relevant blogs, brands, or publishers. This ultimately builds your brand and makes your blog awareness a lot higher than others. Asking others to link to your content in return of you linking back to their content gives you a connection that benefits both parties. In any industry, this is very important because it allows other bloggers to endorse you and build a bigger audience.
Reshare Regularly
Not all of your potential customers are online or on the same social channel at the same time. Additionally, a customer might have read your article the first time and forgot to save it or forward it along to their co-worker. For these reasons, it’s essential that you reshare your content regularly across your social media and even in your newsletter.
Include an “In Case You Missed It” section in your newsletter that highlights previous popular blogs. Choose several one-line teasers or important quotes from your article and schedule tweets throughout the month. Adjust the ad set and re-run your Facebook ad to get your content in front of an even broader audience.
Make It Visual
Infographics provide significant value from a content-supporting standpoint. Companies are constantly generating content, but the bulk of it is often heavy and wordy. Focus on utilizing the visual aspect of infographics to break up the content. Pull important statistics and tidbits of information from your in-depth blog and build out an enticing infographic that users can easily download and view.
Additionally, pull out some other short quotes or statistics to create an eye-popping graphic that you can share on Instagram and Pinterest. Considering you cannot share links in your Instagram posts, prompting users to click the link in your profile is a great way to promote your blog.
Making the Most of Your Content Marketing
In a world where digital consumption is king, there is only one way to fight the battle against your competitors — blogging and distributing your content for all the world to see. Blogging for business is no easy task, but with these tips in mind, you are well equipped to make the most of your time and effort by expanding the reach of your content.
