Your Business Needs a blog in 2021 and How to Measure Its Performance
Your Business Needs a blog in 2021 and How to Measure Its Performance
I am often asked the question from business owners if it’s worth the time and effort to maintain a blog on their website. Business owners spend time setting up social media presence and assume that it’s enough to boost their online presence. Still, a business blog can play a vital role in engaging potential customers.
If you really want to ensure that your business creates its credibility and visibility in the online space, then you must consider regularly posting high-quality and relevant content that could be useful to your potential consumers. Companies – small or multinational, must ensure that blog is an integral part of their Content Marketing strategy. Here are my 5 most important reasons why your business needs a blog.
1. Traffic driver and lead generation
A blog is an amazing way to drive targeted traffic to a site.
Good SEO results from new content and relevant keywords, for which blogs present you with the perfect platform. Search engines like google love frequently posted relevant content, making the search engine bots come and visit your site more often to index fresh content. Whenever a new blog post is published on a website, it adds an indexed page, giving you the chance to show up in search results and get traffic to your site organically.
Users, these days, use google to research almost every decision – big or small. The key is to create content that addresses your audience’s potential questions and address their pain points.
Blogs don’t just help with building brand awareness but also warm prospective customers up to the business. With relevant and well-executed call-to-actions in place on a blog post, you could easily create opportunities to present offers, download reports, whitepapers and convert those visitors to leads for your business. Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog. (DemandMetric)
2. Build authority and credibility
Blogging will give you the chance to showcase your expertise and earn the trust of your audience. Successful companies constantly publish blog articles to assert their authority as industry leaders.
Writing about industry trends and common questions asked by your customers could make you more trusted and prove your credibility as a subject matter expert. In addition, when you engage with your audience with advice, tips, and news related to your industry niche, it sends a clear signal of your expertise and customer service levels, and this could even be the deciding factor between you and your competitor.
Good blog content could also get you backlinks and digital PR. Informational and insightful content is valuable and tends to be picked up and referred to by other websites and blogs. Being linked is a recommendation signal to google, which improves your website authority, improving keyword rankings in search results.
3. Keep the audience updated on your business and services
Blogs give your company a voice and are a great way to educate your customers about what your business can do.
You must aim to create value for your customers. By taking the effort to provide beneficial content for free, you are building loyalty among potential customers who will more likely choose your company over your competitors when they are ready to make a purchase. Some examples of such useful resources you could share via your blog could be a helpful checklist, ideas, recipes, insightful trends, and so on.
You can also use blogs to create and cultivate an interest in your services. The key is to find a way to incorporate your services without making them the main focus of the blog content. For example, businesses like contractors, web designers, boutique agencies, hairdressers could use the blog as a portfolio. Then, use the right call to action to lead your readers to perform the next step, such as contact you or fill a form to reach out.
4. Develop relationships with potential customers
Another important aspect of a blog is to learn more about your customers.
Blogging is the ideal way to build relationships and engage with your audience. Customers can share stories about your products or services or ask questions about them. It could be a great way to understand what the readers have to say – ideas or suggestions. Like social listening, brands can leverage engagement and feedback on blog posts and social media to tweak their marketing strategies.
Answer their questions and respond to your readers as soon as possible, it gives a human aspect to your business, and in turn, you gain insights, build trust and showcase that you care about their opinions. Doing so will also help to boost your brand’s visibility and position you as an industry expert.
5. Boost Social media & Email marketing
A powerful benefit of blogging is the opportunity it creates for others to share the link to your blog.
When you create unique, interesting blogs and provide valuable information, they get shared with a targeted audience. With these shares, you are likely to get even more shares that will help drive users to the blog and hence increase brand awareness. Blogs are like gold when planning your social media calendar – not only can you drive users to your site but also use quotes, images, or screenshots from the blog content to engage with your audience.
You could also use blogs for your newsletters or email marketing. They would help reinforce the trust of users and position your business as a thought leader. If the users find your blog informative or interesting, they could also subscribe to hear from you more often.
How to get started
While creating a successful blog that complements your business and expands its reach to new users, here are some important things to keep in mind.
- Focus on Content Quality – It is essential to ensure high-quality, relevant content that offers value to your target audience.
- Post content regularly – It is ideal if you post content regularly for your readers to come back and search engines to keep coming back to index the site faster.
- Get feedback – It is ideal to ensure you get feedback – positive or negative to know and understand your target audience better.
- Promote content – It is best to promote each blog article across all marketing channels to attract and grow your reader base.
How to measure Content Marketing Performance
It was stated in a recent CMO survey that 65% of marketing professionals couldn’t demonstrate the impact of their marketing quantitatively. So the first challenge is to understand your organization’s goals, the brand’s higher purpose and then decide on the key performance indicators.
I’m listing down the top 5 metrics that should definitely be on your list if you are looking to measure your blog’s performance.
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1. Consumption metrics
Looking at the basics, you need to see how many users are landing on your website. Ideal metrics you want to be looking at should be –
- Sessions
- Users
- Pageviews
Google analytics can further break down where this traffic is coming from – geography, browser, channel, etc. This information helps in understanding and localizing your content to reach out to your target audience. It is also useful to pick up trends like what type of blogs your readers find more engaging.
2. Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics are important to track how people are engaging with the content on your site. Important metrics to look out for would include –
- Average time on page
- Pages per session
- Average session duration
- Bounce Rate
- CTR (Click-through rate)
You could also look at the Social channel aspect to know what content topics resonate more with your followers. Other than google analytics, social listening tools like SproutSocial, SocialBakers, Hootsuite, etc., can quickly show you the best performing content along with shares, comments, etc.
3. Email metrics
If you are using your blogs in email marketing, it is important to analyze your email metrics. This would help give you a clear picture if your messaging is correct and that email marketing is working at achieving its goal of reaching out to users. While looking at your blog’s performance in this area, metrics to watch out for would be –
- Email open rate
- Email Click-through rate
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribes
4. SEO Outcome Metrics
It is important to measure the SEO performance of your blogs. SERP ranking of your important keywords driving traffic to your site is the most important metric to measure. Google search console is the best place to identify the terms you’re ranking for. Also, since the rankings for keywords keep fluctuating, it’s best to track them over time with tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.
The higher you rank for relevant keywords — the relevant traffic will flow in, which could lead to more conversions. On the other hand, if the blog quality is excellent, it is worth aiming for position 0, i.e., featured snippets that get more visibility in search results and higher click-through rates.
5. Conversions
It is important to know what the users are doing once they come to your site and read your blog. Using clever placement of click-to-actions (CTAs), you could push the readers towards the next step to convert.
A conversion could vary from business to business – sale, sign up, form fill up, download pdf, etc. At the end of each blog, you must think about the next step you want the user to perform. Google Analytics provides the ability to set up goals to measure your conversions and even extensive ecommerce tracking to understand where and how the leads or sales flow through your site.
Summary
Blogs humanize businesses and provide a strong foundation for marketing efforts.
Setting up a blog on your business website can you can boost your search engine rankings, build your brand trust and develop relationships with your audience. This could result in your target readers choosing to buy products from you or hire your services over your competitor.
There is a famous saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” by Lord Kelvin. Hence, measure and analyze your content performance and use it to improve your marketing strategies to get to the top!
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