Why do you need a blog in your inbound marketing strategy?

Today, having a blog is a must-have for organizations. But do you know why it is so important to have a blog in your inbound marketing strategy? Stay put and you'll discover it.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing consists in letting people come to you when they are encountering a particular need. By providing them content and tools that answer their questions at this particular point in time, you appear in their research process.

Plus, you know that when someone comes to you, it comes from an interest. It is then easier to break the ice and build a relationship from there.

Doing inbound marketing requires to know your customer and the path that leads him to your organisation. Starting from there, you can define when and where to meet him with your marketing efforts.

Generating inbound leads by creating content that touches people

In this context, a blog is a way to provide content to your buyer persona at the most strategical times. It is a tool that you can use to answer questions, relate to the issues that the persona is facing, give tips on how to handle a situation, sharing best practices...

A blog should contain content about topics that you master. Talk about what you know in order to attract the attention of the right people. By appearing like an expert of a question, people will turn to you for practical solutions.

The web is about content: Blog and SEO

The initials SEO stand for Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, it refers to all of the technics put into place to make your website well ranked in the results page of search engines.

Search engines' jobs are to propose the most relevant content to answer someone's question. They will promote the content that they consider the more relevant to respond to the user's intent. The content that will consider being the more original, relevant and from an authoritative source will be pushed higher.

But that is still very large. What SEO is really about is to make your content appear to the right people at the right moment.

Having a blog enables you to write on multiple subject and different aspects. That way, you can answer multiple questions and appear in the results for a large variety of queries. This will make your organisation visible on those questions.

What does it mean? Find what makes you different and write about it. This way, you can meet people that are searching for that particular subject on search engines. And you'll win their heart by answering their question.

Use it in other channels: Social media

People are not looking for informations in only one place. That's why you shouldn't limit yourself to the search engines.

Use your blog posts as a subject to talk about on your social media accounts. Promoting your blog posts will give you a chance to reach out to your audience with content that is interesting for them. On social media platforms, people also have the opportunity to share the content, which can potentially increase the size of your audience.

Sharing with hashtags will make you reach a bigger audience of people interested in the subject of your blog post.

Newsletter

Talk about your blog posts in your newsletter. Your subscribers are interested in learning new things and hearing about you. And that's a great way to do it.

A newsletter is a tool that you can use to build a credibility and a relationship with your subscriber. Giving them some pieces of content to read in order to further their knowledge is a good way to appear like the expert of the field that you are.

The essentials of a blog

Now that you know what is the purpose of a blog in inbound marketing, let's see how to put your blog into place.

1. Define your goals

What do you want to do with this blog? This is a fundamental question. Do you want to write about problems related to all of your products/ Services? Do you want to give definitions about concepts? Do you want to focus on one aspect of your activities? What would be the most interesting for your buyer persona?

Answering those questions will help you set up a strategy for your blog. Once you know what you want to achieve and what is the exact purpose of it, you can go further on the project.

2. Choose your platform

Once you've define the goal of the blog, you can choose the CMS on which building it. At Elixir Solutions, we recommend using HubSpot, because it offers a whole lot of functionalities with which you can use the blog.

Built around a CRM, you have functionalities to personalize the experience for the visitors of the blog. You also have lead capture tools and strategic tools that will help you optimize your blog the best.

3. Define the responsibilities

Having a clear repartition of the roles is key. Who is going to set up the blog? Who's in charge of creating content? Who is going to design it?

All of those questions need to be answered from the start. You maybe will need to hire new persons or a marketing agency to take care of all of the work.

4. Brainstorm to find blog posts ideas

In coherence with your strategy, define what topics you want to cover. Pull out of it blog posts ideas that are interesting for your persona.

5. Create an editorial planning

Define the points in time when you should publish them. Define the frequency of publication. And stick to it.

6. Write, write and write

This is self explanatory. Follow your plan, and check the results that you get. After a few months, those will help you adapt your plan to get more results.

7. Lead generation

Having a blog is great. But in itself it is less efficient. To improve the results, you can also use it in your lead generation strategy. Allied with lead generation offers, you have more chances to convert your readers into customers. 

Conclusion

Having a blog is an integrated part of a good inbound marketing strategy. It covers a lot of benefits and functions, but the main one is to appear as a result to find a particular buyer persona at a particular moment of its life/work. Write about what you know, and people will come to you naturally. 

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Wondering about how this applies to big companies? In this blog we explain how big companies can also do inbound marketing