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