Another week and another blog! “What’s the point?” you might ask, and it would be a fair question. At least it would be if you are in a 20th century mindset that says all marketing is about sending out offers to immediately impact your P&L; If you believe that marketing is all about pushing tactical activity out to deliver sales spikes – short term income in the hope of building to an exit that is based on long term equity.
Blogs don’t deliver sales spikes, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t support long-term growth. If I think about our blogs from Focus7, nothing could be further from our minds than sales spikes. We use our blogs to keep you up to date with trends, to talk about things that we are doing that we think you might want to engage with, to give you ideas and to stimulate thought processes. We talk about the problems that we encounter and how we go about addressing them and share content that we believe is relevant to you.
We never try to sell anything to you – we want you to get to know us and to engage with us. We believe that if you like what we write, if the problems, pain points and issues that we address resonate with you, and if you consider that we will have the answers to these, you’ll contact us when you need to. After all, who wants to be sold to?
I don’t suggest that makes us unique, it’s a fairly typical blog content strategy, so I was interested to read the results of a survey that HubSpot has just carried out with 300 of their customers.
They asked them, “Have you ever purchased something from a company after reading a blog post from them?”
Now remember, the purpose of blogs is not selling, it is building personal and business brand recognition, educating, entertaining or stimulating.
So you might be surprised to discover that over half of the people surveyed, in fact 56% of respondents, said that they had purchased from a company after reading their blogs.
This proves a point – people don’t buy because you try to sell to them, they buy when you align with their emotional journey. They will come to you when they can recognise empathy, see you understand their pain points, worries and concerns and that you can help to solve them.
Maybe the best way to put it is that blogs do not drive sales, but they do position you and your business and encourage your contacts to purchase when it’s appropriate for them. That is why blogs should be an essential part of your marketing mix.
If you are not sure about how to put a blog together, here are 10 top tips for writing effective blogs.
And here’s a bonus eleventh tip… You don’t have to write new content all of the time, but it is good practice to establish a routine of posting regular blogs if you can.
If you struggle to write blogs yourself, delegate within your team or outsource to someone like Focus7 who can help.
If you’d like to discuss blog writing or a wider contextualised content marketing strategy, please get in touch with me at david@focus7int.com or vida@focus7int.com… when the time is right!