You have a WordPress lead generation site you’re happy with. It does a good job of advertising your business and the services it offers. A trickle of leads visit your site, and some of them fill in a contact form. Everything seems to be going well. Your site lacks one thing: a blog, but you’re wondering whether a blog is worth the effort — after all, content can be expensive. Sure, a blog is a nice thing to have, but does a business lead-generation site really need a blog? Will investing the time and effort it takes to create a blog pay off?
If you do it right, the answer is almost alway yes. A blog is not essential, but it can be a useful resource, especially for lead generation and inbound marketing. If you have a business site and you’re pondering whether to add a blog, here’s why I think you should take the leap.
Help Qualified Leads Find Your Site
Business blogging is all about creating content that appeals to the people who are likely to be interested in buying your products. It’s worth stressing that the idea is not to publish sales copy, but to publish content that a specific group will find valuable.
Without a blog — and content marketing in general — you’ll have to rely on more traditional outbound marketing techniques like PPC advertising, which can be effective, but which have limitations. Publishing high-quality, lead-oriented content on your site will create a resource that generates qualified leads over the long term.
Demonstrate Your Business’s Value
How does a prospective customer know that your company meets their needs? Sales copy will get you some of the way, demonstrating what your company offers, but it doesn’t show leads that you are committed to customer service and have the expertise that they demand.
Publishing relevant content of value to your desired audience can demonstrate those qualities. Blogging gives you a platform to show leads that you are a thought leader in your field and that you care about your customers.
Build A Community
I’m often skeptical of the concept of community-building for companies. Communities are groups of like-minded people who come together because the community offers them something they want or need. That’s not exactly what we’re talking about here: customers come to businesses to have a need fulfilled by the business, not by other customers.
Nevertheless, companies can benefit from becoming a trusted source of valuable information on a topic relevant to particular community — a community that has an interest in buying the products or services that company offers. Blogging is the easiest and least resource-intensive method of engaging with a community.
Create Shareable Content
Even if they don’t have a blog, most companies do have a social media presence. In fact, I often hear business leaders question the value of blogging when they already have social media channels on which they can publish content. However, blogging can enhance a company’s social media presence. Short posts and shares of other publishers’ posts is great, but being able to share links to content on your site, content with your calls-to-action embedded, is far more valuable than simply building an audience on social media.
As I said at the beginning of this post, blogging isn’t essential, but it can help your company raise its inbound marketing game significantly and generate leads that would otherwise never visit your site.
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