At Blink;Tech, we specialize in using carefully-crafted web content to bring targeted traffic to our client’s websites and, ultimately, conversions for their businesses. While our marketing team employs all flavors of social media and pay-per-click marketing strategies, in the end it is that finely-tuned web content (usually in the form of a blog) that drives the majority of converting traffic in both the short and long-term. And from a marketing perspective, the long-term game is by far the most valuable.
Social Media Is Fleeting
There is so much focus on social media these days that often businesses will have an in-house staff member running the social media accounts. Following his or her directive, this person will, more likely than not, get wrapped up in all the trappings of social media, judging success and failure purely by the number of likes, comments, and shares a post gets. Posts will usually be short updates about the business or shared pictures and articles from outside sources. Hours after each post has been put up, it becomes buried deep in a follower’s timeline, no longer providing any marketing benefit whatsoever for the business.
Pay-Per-Click Goes Only as Far as Your Budget
Compared to your average social media post, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has an even shorter shelf life. Basically, the second your budget runs out, all traces of your PPC marketing disappear as if it never existed. As long as the money flows, your ads appear — but once they are down, there is practically zero long-term benefit.
Blogging Is the Gift that Keeps on Giving
The missing component that can turn those ephemeral jabs at business promotion into long-term, highly productive web marketing is the blog.
In the case of social media, if a post consists of a callout and a link to a blog post on your website containing valuable, industry-related information for your target audience (read “potential customer”), then not only will you direct them even closer to the center of your web footprint (and your contact information), but you will also give those users to the opportunity to explore other blog posts that may be of interest to them. All this content on your website further adds to your perceived authority and helps out tremendously with branding.
When it comes to PPC, if an Internet ad brings visitors to a landing page on your site, you want to keep them there as long as possible. The best way to do this is to provide them with insightful content — again, that adds to your perceived authority and helps with the branding of your business.
Blog Content Establishes Authority
That word “authority” is one of the most important words in an Internet marketer’s vocabulary. Whether posting on social media, creating a pay-per-click ad, or writing a blog, the goal is to clearly establish that the business is on top in the industry. You want your website to be the go-to source for all things related to your business’ particular area of expertise. The branding on your website (logos, slogans, etc.) offers the visitor a quick way to recognize and remember the authority you have established.
So How Does This Translate into Long-Term?
“Authority” also happens to be the most important word in the vocabulary of an SEO expert. Authority (established by traffic, linking, keyword density, and other factors) is used by search engines such as Google and Bing to rank web pages on a given user’s search engine results pages (SERPs). As more blogs are added to a website, the more defined (and hopefully robust) the authority of that website becomes for a given topic or industry. This authority is further established by visitors clicking through keyword-rich social media posts and even PPC ads to get to the website, then navigating the site’s content. This tells Google and other search engines whether or not that person found what they were looking for. If so, that website is considered a good authority on that topic, and this will have very positive long-term effects for the website and business far into the future.
Another common situation that beautifully illustrates the long-term benefits of blogging is when a current event (whether local or national) gets people searching for a specific topic to get more information. If your website has an older blog that covered this topic well, you could find yourself with a viral blog post that was written months or years prior to the viral event. Here’s an example: You have a real estate website and blogged on a particular piece of property that no one else had ever written about. If that property was suddenly slated for controversial development, you may see a flood of traffic to your website as people googled frantically for information relating to the property. Your website would be perceived as the authority for local property information by both users and Google. All because of an “old blog” you had on your website.
Blogging Is SEO
In everything shared above, we hope to make clear that the success of blog content in marketing relies deeply on the quality and relevance of the writing. Blog writing is a very specialized skill that requires a deep understanding of language, social media, and SEO. A bad blog can dilute the authority of a website and harm your SEO — while a good blog can send you to the top of the SERPs for a given topic.
Are you using blogging in your long and short-term marketing? If you would like to learn more about how you can harness the marketing power of carefully-crafted blog content, please get in touch with us.
