Why Tech Marketers Must Have a Blog
Corporate blogging can be a pain in the butt. I get that. Subject matter experts are busy with other more “mission critical” work. Some of them can’t write well anyway. Actual contribution to sales is hard to measure. Creating genuinely effective articles is much more difficult than most people realize – especially over the long haul.
And that, my friends, creates a great opportunity for you because many tech company leaders either red light a blog initiative altogether or start one and then get bored with it.
But marketing data clearly shows that blogging works. In addition to all the immeasurable things such as thought leadership and reader relationships, blogs have proven to bring more traffic to your website and ultimately generate more leads for you.
Consider this 2012 data from Hubspot:
Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog.
B2B companies that blog only 1 – 2X per month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog.
And this from a 2010 survey by TopRank Marketing:
54% of search marketers see a measurable lift in page rank within the first three months of a blogging campaign.
Remarkable, isn’t it? And just in case that isn’t enough to send my point home, here’s a list of 6 more reasons your tech marketing efforts need a blog.
Search engines. Regardless of how you feel about SEO, search engines do bring traffic to technology websites. Regular blogging quickly adds pages to your website giving search engines more content to index. More content means more ways for you to show up in search listings. Blog articles also provide a way to get quality inbound links – something Google loves.
Familiarity. Blog articles provide an opportunity for buyers to get to know you and/or your company on a more human level than regular web pages. Over time, if your content is of value to your buyers, you’ll build a relationship that can easily move on to a sales situation.
Education. Technology buyers seek a great deal of information throughout the buying process, and a blog is a great way to help buyers learn more about their problems and your solution. It also allows you to tell the story your own way.
Return traffic. By posting new content continuously you’ll give visitors a reason to come back to your site and stay engaged with you until they’re ready to talk with a sales person.
Thought leadership. Blogging helps establish you as an authority on the subject of your choice. It’s a great place to introduce new ideas and to present your vision for the future.
Action. Blog articles are a particularly effective place to encourage visitors to take action – whether to attend a webinar, request a demo or sign up for your newsletter. Because these types of links are contextual (the call-to-action and surrounding content are related to each other) click-through rates tend to be much higher than other calls to action.
Summary
So there you have it. Blogging is good. Bottom line is: blogging is a long term tech marketing asset that will increase the traffic and leads your website generates. It’s not easy, and maybe that’s part of what makes it so valuable.