The Role of Blogging for Inbound Marketing

Blogging for inbound marketing is crucial. Could you have a successful inbound marketing strategy without blogging? Slim chance!

A blog falls primarily in the Attract realm of inbound marketing. This is at the very top of the inbound marketing funnel where you attracting website visitors because you have relevant information to offer them based on what they are looking for. Most of these visitors will be strangers, meaning they may have never even heard of your company before. Without attracting enough visitors to your site you'll have less people converting to leads and less leads nurtured to sales.

Blogging's Impact on Inbound Marketing

When a business blogs on a regular basis they create new content for visitors to find them. This content created should be useful and relevant to the visitor and if you are hoping to turn leads into sales, the content should be relevant to your business as well. By creating more blog posts you create more opportunity to attract visitors looking for this relevant information.

Think of it this way, if you rely on your main website to attract visitors you are relying on the limited amount of pages on that website to rank well in search engines. Those limited amount of pages only have a limited amount of content on them, hurting your ability to rank for a wider array of keywords. Additionally your website content will likely be geared to reaching individuals in the later stages of the buyer's journey while your blog posts can help them at the awareness stage, giving you the opportunity to start building a relationship with the prospect sooner. Blog post content opportunities are unlimited! You can blog have "top 5" blogs, "how to" blogs, humorous blogs, story telling blogs...you get the point. These are types of content you would probably never put on your main website, but these are the types of content people want to read!

Blogging also helps direct people to your content marketing pieces which you should be using to collect leads. Your blog posts will contain CTAs (calls-to-actions), which should be directed to landing pages, which should collect an email address (or other pertinent information), which will then allow the visitor to download the respective content marketing piece (ebook, whitepaper, guide, checklist, etc.). You will also have CTAs on your main website as well, but again, this content and these pages are limited, blogging is unlimited!

Still not convinced? Here are some blogging stats!

80% of daily blog visits are unique. This means you are reaching more people, not just getting more traffic.

A business that blogs daily gets 5X more visits than one that blogs weekly.

Marketers that prioritize bloggin are 13x more likely to generate a positive ROI (return on investment)

80% of business decision makers prefer to learn about a company from a series of articles as opposed to an ad. Blogging is just as important in the B2B world!

Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages in search engines.

70% of blog traffic each month comes from blogs that weren't published in that same month. Blogging has a long-term impact!

Blog stats from Hubspot, BufferApp, CMI.