Blog Marketing – A Short Explanation

Blog Marketing is a content marketing strategy. The marketing strategy uses blogs to address potential customers directly and individually, thus achieving customer loyalty for their own brand. This type of marketing uses viral marketing methods in which an interest group is built based on a blog. Readers can interact with the producers of content that is generally informative and entertaining, therefore increasing brand loyalty and identification potential. Shop bloggers for instance work on behalf of specific companies to promote their products and demonstrate their uses.

How Blog Marketing Entered Business and Corporate Arenas

Blog Marketing is a World Wide Web evolution of business successes. Blog-style content has proved to engage humans on many psychological levels. This marketing strategy derived its purpose from original web loggers. The term “web log” became “weblog” which became today’s “blog”.

Blog Marketing strategy entered business marketing arenas because of the onset of both technological advances and evolutional trends. These two events stemmed from personal online journals written by people who could program their own websites. Prior to 1999, only website programmers could customize their blogging platforms.

When blogging entered the business arena, it traveled through a series of trials beginning with pop culture, politics, and news events. The first media and business blogs were popular because they produced more in-depth coverage than mainstream media websites.

In 2017, businesses use Blog Marketing to engage their target market, potential customers, and retain to current customers.

Blog Marketing Production

In 2017, Blog Marketing has shown to increase lead flow by 60% on average and in some cases as much as 700%. Blog Marketing is an integrated part of content marketing and a strategy for acquiring leads and/or prospects. Predictably, these leads will buy a product or service from the company employing this tactic. There are differing opinions on the definition of leads and prospects. But, Blog Marketing is a proven, effective way to develop leads and prospects.

Also, as of 2017, Blog Marketing is easily managed and produced on the blog pages of a commercial website. The revolutionary ease of use with website formats like WordPress and Hubspot do not require webmaster services to move, add, delete, and update content on a Website.

Blog Marketing content relies on personas, also called customer profiles and buyer personas. Personas are defined by the use of search habits of website visitors’ keyword searches as well as website behavior. Blog Marketing utilizes several other information-mining systems that record visitors’ interactive behavior on a website. This website tracks persona actions and retrieves their data. This data then becomes the purpose for the content of the business blog.

Elements and Components of Blog Marketing

Sprout Content, an industry leader in “the business of conversation”, offers the following reasons for businesses to incorporate Blog Marketing:

  • Blogs use simple platforms that allow for connecting with and sharing timely and meaningful information for a direct information channel to customers.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engines reward valuable content that is regularly published.
  • Companies do not need the services of a webmaster to implement Blog Marketing because of the development of revolutionary blogging platforms like WordPress and Hubspot.
  • Businesses that blog can accumulate up to 60% more customers
  • A blog is the purpose for all content marketing goals. Businesses can use their blog’s content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and for ebooks and email newsletters or anywhere they distribute content.
  • Blogs give a company a voice and connect its audience to new products and services, news, timely information, market trends, and to what happens at the company beyond its website.
  • Blogs showcase a company’s expertise and influencers and establish industry credibility.
  • Blogs establish two-way conversations with customers, industry associates, and potential buyers by creating a comment section below the blog. This can build confidence in the company and can increase sales.
  • One of the elements of Blog Marketing includes creating a blog calendar similar to an editorial calendar. Blogging keeps a company centered on its content marketing goals.
  • Blog Marketing is a public relations tool. News outlets and journalists pay attention to high profile blogs and bloggers.
  • A business must define who its audience is and why it is blogging to that demographic. This tightens up the purpose of the company’s marketing strategies.
  • Companies can promote their brand stories, relay company philosophies, highlight employees, and reveal innovative ideas through blogging. This lets customers and prospects understand how that business can help solve customer problems with its products and services.
  • Blogs are long-term marketing assets and extremely cost-effective. Blogs do not go away. In 2017, many websites maintain a content curation page on their website which drives SEO.
  • Companies can take advantage of blog analytics which keep a log of click-through rates, trending topics, social media shares, comments, and what days and times of the day the blog receives the most visitors.
  • Sprout Content declares that blogging is inspiring. Employees involved in their company’s Blog Marketing process begin to see new ideas in everyday events of life wherever they go.