Blogging to Attract Potential Customers-Inbound Marketing

 

What Is Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a strategy for developing your business by attracting and engaging customers, prospects, and clients to your brand through search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, and social and video marketing. Blogging falls into the content marketing category and it involves producing content to attract, engage or delight prospects and customers. It also allows you to demonstrate expertise which could help in differentiating your brand from competitors.

How Can Blogging Improve Customer Acquisition

Customers generally go through five stages while connecting with a brand or a product. These stages are awareness, consideration, decision, retention and loyalty. You can influence customers at each of these stages to improve acquisition and retention.

Create Awareness

Potential customers may be unaware of your brand or the solutions you provide or the solutions they need.  You can write articles or produce other forms of digital content that address their needs or pain points. Blogging also allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and establish credibility. You’d need to optimize your articles for search engines to rank them enough for customers to find them. This involves incorporating specific keywords and phrases related to your product, or problems clients are trying to solve. Over time, customers will start relying on your website or social media as a trustworthy resource for solving their problems. This will help to nurture leads, guide them through the sales funnel, and ultimately drive greater inbound sales.

A local pet grooming firm, for example, can publish blog posts optimised for keywords such as “best pet grooming techniques” or “dog grooming tips.” This method increases their chances of ranking higher in search results when people search for related topics, resulting in more exposure and possible clients.

Improve Consideration

Beyond creating awareness, you can use blogging to persuade potential customers to buy your product or service. At the consideration stage of the customer journey, customers are actively exploring and evaluating potential solutions. Blogging can help them make informed decisions by providing them with the knowledge they need. You can highlight the unique features of your products or services, provide in-depth tutorials, or highlight case studies. You can also address typical objections or concerns that potential customers may have, making it easier for them to make buying decisions.

Improve Decision Making

Customers are ready to make a purchase or commit to a certain solution at the decision stage. At this stage, you are emphasising the unique benefits of your products or services. Shopping websites improve buying decisions by publishing reviews on products you want to purchase.  You can also share success stories and consumer testimonials. Above everything else, ensure you have strong social evidence that your product is worth the buy.

Retain Customers

Blogging is still useful after a buyer has made a purchase. You can create additional resources, and offer ideas or assistance on how to make the most of their purchase. You can also create help articles to support customers in case they encounter problems while using your product. This can improve customer loyalty, drive repeat purchases, and potentially generate referrals through word-of-mouth marketing.

Increase Loyalty

At this stage, concentrate on providing a great end-to-end customer experience: website content, sales and support channels, social media engagement and user experience. It is important to note that people become loyal after experiencing success with a product – if it works, they are likely to recommend your product to others.

Setting Up a Blog for Your Bussiness or Product

You’ve created your website (or you have an existing website) and you want to make sure that you are writing articles or producing other forms of content that improve your marketing efforts. Follow these steps.

Determine your Target Audience

Define your ideal customer profile and learn about their wants, problems, and interests. This will help you tailor your blog content to them. You’d need to develop a user persona. A user persona is a semi-fictional character of your existing or ideal consumer. They represent the demographics, actions, motives, and pain points of your target audience. User personas are created using the insights of customer research which can include customer interviews or secondary research using published data. If you’ve already generated leads or sales, you may use that past data (such as customer feedback or reviews). It’s also important to know how your potential customers are currently interacting with social media and how they generally find new information.

Define Your Blogging Goals

There is no shortage of good marketing ideas, but you should be able to tie those ideas to specific goals. So, you should define your goals before you begin blogging. Do you want to raise brand awareness, improve website traffic, create leads, or increase sales? Understanding your goals will inform your blogging approach.

Create a Content Strategy for Your Blog

Create a content strategy that is aligned with your objectives. Determine the types of material you’ll produce (how-to guides, product reviews, industry insights, and so on) and build a content calendar to ensure constant publication. To provide value to your readers while marketing your products or services, consider using a mix of instructive, entertaining, and promotional content. You can also automate publishing using scheduling tools like Buffer. Most social media platforms now have scheduling features, so you don’t have to publish content in real time.

Perform Keyword Research before Blogging

Conduct keyword research to find relevant keywords and phrases for your business. To find popular search phrases with appropriate search traffic and minimal competition, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Moz Keyword Explorer. In order to optimize your blog entries for search engines, incorporate those keywords into your posts.

Produce Interesting and Informative Content

Begin by writing high-quality, educational, and entertaining content that highlights your expertise and tackles the pain points of your target audience. Each blog article should have a certain purpose and provide value. To make your material aesthetically engaging and shareable, consider combining text, images, videos, infographics, and other media formats. To boost readability, use attention-grabbing headlines and employ subheadings, bullet points, and paragraphs.

SEO-Optimize Your Blog Posts

Use search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to boost the visibility of your blog in search engine results. Include important keywords in the title, headings, URL, meta description, and throughout the text to optimise your blog entries. Check that your blog has a user-friendly structure, a quick loading time, and mobile friendliness. Include alt language in your photographs, interlink your blog entries, and encourage other websites to link to your content. Please take note of these key rules while creating blog articles for your website:

1. The length of your articles should be at least 1,000 words.
2. Segment your blog post using H2 and H3 headers.
3. Ensure you have a meta description for your article.
4. Ensure you link your articles to other relevant internal and external pages
5.  Make sure that you are always writing about topics relevant to your business. The more homogenous your website, the better your chances of being found.
6. Ensure your blog articles are indexed on Google. You can sign up and Google Search Console, link your website and submit your blog articles for indexing. If your website is not indexed on Google, you will not get any form of organic traffic.

Market Your Blog

Besides gaining organic traffic, promotion is essential for increasing the reach of your blog. Share your blog entries on social media, via email newsletters, and in relevant online forums. Mention influencers or industry experts in your blog pieces or reach out to them for partnership opportunities. Use guest blogging to provide useful content to other websites while linking back to your own. Add social sharing buttons to your blog entries to encourage visitors to share your material. For example, you can gain traffic from Linkedin by interacting with other content creators and commenting on their posts. When people view your Linkedin profile, you may end up visiting your website, if you include the link to your website on your profile.

Communicate with Your Audience

Respond to comments, answer questions, and encourage interactions with your readers. By actively connecting with your audience, you may create a community around your site. Encourage readers to sign up for your blog in order to receive updates and new content. Consider including a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of each blog post to encourage readers to perform the desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing something.

Track Your Performance

It’s always important to track your performance. If you are leveraging social media platforms like Instagram, Linkedin or Facebook, these sites have analytic features that allow you to see how well you are performing. You can also use Google Analytics. It is an excellent tool for determining the efficacy of your marketing efforts. For example, you can get precise information about your website’s traffic sources.