Blogging frequently about topics that are relevant to your audience is a simple, easy and inexpensive way to enhance your marketing efforts. With inbound marketing and using the Buyer’s Journey to tailor your content, your blogs should see plenty of traffic coming to your website while attracting more potential customers.
All of the benefits of blogging for your business are clear to see. You can develop and strengthen relationships with existing and new customers for starters. Then, these blogs help connect people to your brand, create opportunities for sharing and establish your business as an industry leader.
However, blogging about anything without any goal or purpose won’t really help you. Every single blog post that you publish should be written with a specific part of the Buyer’s Journey in mind.
The great thing about inbound marketing is that with prior research, you know what your target audience is searching for and they’ll come to you for the answers. To provide that value, start by targeting a specific stage of the Buyer’s Journey for all of your blogs by doing your research and creating in-depth Buyer Personas – a semi-fictional representation of your target audience.
You also need to have a clear and well-defined content strategy in place which will provide a clear message to the readers at each stage. This helps to build trust and credibility. When you have your content strategy aligned with your Buyer’s Journey, you’ll constantly provide the right type of content at the right time so readers are engaged and want to learn more.
How Blogs Help Reach Customers at the Awareness Stage
In the awareness stage, the buyers know that they have a problem but they don’t have a solution. That’s where your blogs come in to provide the answers and sort out their pain points.
They’ll have plenty of questions. However, the search terms they type in on search engines on Google are pretty vague. Plan a family holiday, right shoulder pain, remove a virus – with vague search terms like these, you’ll know that the buyers are still learning about their problem at a high level.
To reach customers at this stage, your blogs need to educate the readers about the problem they have, why they might be having these problems and providing solutions. Perhaps the biggest thing to keep in mind, though, is that you definitely shouldn’t mention your company, product or service here as they still need educating.
If we use the examples mentioned above, you might end up using awareness blogs such as:
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Five Reasons You’re Suffering From Right Shoulder Pain
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How to Plan a Family Holiday That They’ll All Enjoy
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How to Remove a Virus From Your Laptop in Seven Easy Steps
The content in these blogs will provide the readers with plenty of information that educates them – but they won’t mention you. Here, you’re reaching customers by creating blogs tailored towards the vague search terms they’re typing in on search engines.
These awareness-style blogs usually target broad search terms and the benefit of blogging at this stage of the Buyer’s Journey is that you’re casting a wide net for attracting a lot of visitors.
By educating them and giving a solution, the buyers will not only trust you more but will also think of your business again when they’re in the consideration stage.
How Blogs Help Reach Customers at the Consideration Stage
At this stage, the buyers have defined their problem and will want to know why they have this problem or even options to overcome the challenges they’re facing.
If we use the examples like the ones above again, the readers will be questioning things like:
- How Can I Fix My Right Shoulder Pain After Going to the Gym?
- Five Ways to Take the Family on Holiday on a Budget.
- How Can I Remove a Virus Without Losing All of My Work?
The blogs you publish at the consideration stage of the Buyer’s Journey will offer quick and easy solutions. This is so that you build even more trust with the readers.
The benefit here is that the search terms used for consideration stage blogs are more specific, which means the visitors reading these blogs will be more qualified and more prone to moving along the Buyer’s Journey.
Plus, the consideration stage is where your prospects are likely to become leads as they want more information. That’s why it’s vital you continue blogging for your business and provide more useful content as they can potentially end up as contacts so you can help them make a decision in the next stage.
How Blogs Help Reach Customers at the Decision Stage
Finally, after so much research through reading your blogs, the buyers determine the problem as well as the best possible solution. Now, your blogs help the buyers implement that solution and it’s the perfect time to show how your company can help them.
Obviously, that trust is there because the blogs you’ve published up until this stage have helped them and kept them engaged. Even though decision stage blogs are going to reference your company, the best way to angle these blogs is to make them about the buyer and not sell yourself.
For example, explain that the buyer will solve their problem and be better off with your help because of X Y and Z, as opposed to writing a blog stating ‘We’re the best because…’
The Importance of Evergreen Content
The way in which this helps reach customers is that blogs like these are evergreen content, meaning there’s no time limit on how relevant they are because your target audience might come across these problems at different stages.
So, this content is always here as the blogs live on forever and you’ll continue to reach more and more customers as they face these problems. When you’re planning your blogs, keep the Buyer’s Journey and the inbound methodology in mind. Make sure you assign each blog post to one of the three stages we’ve highlighted above so that you know the questions you’re going to answer in the blogs.
How Blogging for Business Helps With SEO
Search engines like Google absolutely love fresh content, and there’s nothing better than providing them with frequent and valuable blog posts. By blogging for your business consistently, you give Google and other search engines newer content to index. This creates even more opportunities to add in some vital keywords.
These keywords help you get ranked and increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) while keeping your website fresh and current. Google also priorities providing people with information they’re actually looking for so they’ll keep coming back to use Google. For example, if someone clicks on the first link, finds it unhelpful and leaves, this tells Google that the first result wasn’t as helpful as they thought.
On the other hand, when someone clicks on a result and they stay on that page for a while, this tells Google that the website is very helpful. So, regularly blogging and providing value in each blog by following the Buyer’s Journey will keep people on your website for longer which helps your ranking on Google.
Blogging also gives your business opportunities to internally link, and these are quite easy as you create them for yourself. The more relevant blogs you publish about related topics, the more opportunities you have to naturally link pages together. If you need a starting point when it comes to writing blogs, take a look at this checklist.
For SEO benefits, each time this is done, you can strategically use anchor text to tell Google what the page you’re linking to is about and that strengthens its connection to your target keywords and how the algorithm sees it. While internal links are important for SEO, consistent blogs also mean that other website can point readers in your direction and it gives them a reason to link back to your blog which can also affect rankings.
By creating blogs for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey, you’re also helping the SEO aspect. It all helps with a number of things that can affect ranking factors. When you have a blog for each stage, it’s updated regularly and is full of quality with relevant topics for your audience, which can make a big difference on how your website performs in search engines.
This guest blog was written by Digital 22, a Hubspot Inbound Marketing Agency.
Here at Consortium, we can help you with your blog writing. Why not give us a call on 01903 530787 or email marketing@consortiumbiz.co.uk to discuss further?