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What Is the Use of Blogging, It’s Passé. Let’s Focus on Social Media Instead

Blogging, Social Media, and search engine; that’s the trinity in unity which gives your business marketing an edge over others. If your marketing strategy lacks in any of these, it will soon be remembered as a failed strategy. Remember that your blog is that magical content which drives the interest of the users. The search engine is a place where people go to find something related to their interest. And the social media is a place where you track the right audience with the same interest drive that resides in your content, the blog. So, that’s the trinity in unity! They simply can’t work alone, at least successfully.

How Blogging Is Still an Up-to-Date Marketing Tool for Your Business?

  • They can type your name in the browser to find you, but are they your new audience. No! They are people who already know about you and that’s why they simply typed your name to land at your website.

  • They can come to your website through the emails that you sent in their inbox, but for them to receive your email, you’ll first have to find them so that you can send them your marketing mail. And you don’t find them just like that! You’ll have to buy for their email list, which is kind of an expensive stuff.

  • They can click on your ads visible at various web pages that people often visit. But those ads aren’t placed there for free! You’ll have to buy those places to drop your ads there. Again, that’s an expensive way!

  • One other way is the paid searches, but yet again, they are a very expensive deal, especially for small businesses who generally rely on a small client base. That’s why they refrain from investing much in PPC.

Now, if these popular ways aren’t reasonable for you to get found by the users, how else you’ll get found! Well, the answer is organic searches. That’s free and shows the genuine interest of the users in your content as well as your products and services. For that to happen, you’ll have to hook the user’s interests which is possible only through informative, impressive and entertaining content. And what could be a better form of content than a blog which itself can be more than just texts. It can contain images, infographic, audio, motion graphics and even a video along with its original element, i.e., text. No other form of content can contain all these elements in itself, and even if it could, it couldn’t be covered on a scale that a blog is able to do.

Recall the blogs that you used to read a decade ago. All they contained were texts, and less often some images. With time passing, various new forms of content like GIFs, white board animations, or the motion graphics videos started occupying the digital space. However, they didn’t hurt the tradition of blogging, instead when added to the blogs, they helped in enriching the quality of those blogs, making them popular more than ever. It proves that a blog can never be an outdated marketing tool. It will somehow keep changing its form to make itself more informative, educative, impressive, and entertaining, which is exactly what the blogs are meant for. And comparing it with social media will mean not doing justice to it. That’s because:

  • The popularity of Social Media Platforms keeps changing, with some even getting winded up.

  • Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram limit the style and design of your content.

  • They don’t provide much limits of word use like Twitter which limits the length of its post to 140 characters only.

  • The best use of social media as a business marketing tool, apart from finding and making relations to the right audience, is linking the blogs and other content from your website, so that the user can go to your website through the link provided on their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.

Here’s A Case Study

In 2015, we approached our 7 very old clients in the lead generation business. We requested them to invest more money in digital marketing projects so that we could create and publish more content. Two clients refused. One client said, “If you cannot do it at that budget, stop it. I can always hire another agency.” The other one responded with an analysis that said,“….213 pieces of blog content have earned us just 9 clients. So, we conclude that it’s an ineffective medium and we should not invest further in it.”

It didn’t came as a surprise to us. After spending years in this business, we were aware that clients often refuse to understand the importance of quality content in marketing their business. What the clients don’t understand is that blogging is about thought leadership and networking, and not about selling. It’s about being an industry leader. And with a not-so-compelling content, you lose authority. A content that’s low on quality may reach to a thousand number of audience with the help of social media platforms, and many of them may read your blog too, but that wouldn’t be enough to convert them into customers.

The objective of writing a blog is to hook the customer’s interests and make them subscribe it rather than sell. Once they are in, then you should start the sales process by asking about their requirements through surveys or emails.

We convinced a few of them by analyzing and stating them about the effectiveness of the quality content/blog. Our arguments were:

  • A quality content/blog helps in improving personas and adding personas.
  • We insisted on the originality of content idea that has the ability of addressing the users’ pain points.
  • The importance of working on a brand voice consistent across all channels.
  • Working out a publishing calendar with actual time reserved for engagement activities on the blog like polls or time bound coupon codes.

To tell you about the clients who refused us- WE fired them, and didn’t let THEM firing us. Reason: If we care about their business enough to suggest ways to improve it, we expect at least, a certain degree of politeness.

Profit Incurred

  • By the end of 2015, our client had received request for 3 podcast shows.
  • His email list grew by 21%.
  • This client also received great reviews for his services without asking for it.

Key Takeaways

  • If blogging is done the right way, it creates industry leadership.
  • Social media is very important for sharing your blog/content with the right and a wide range of audience.
  • You need to publish original content that is of great value to your prospects.
  • Share curated content with contributors. It brings extra traffic.

Blogging isn’t about writing product descriptions, nor it is necessarily about directly advertising your product or service. Blogging is about writing your views, and building thought leadership through them. It’s also about powering social media by engaging people into a conversation through your views. Overall, that creates awareness about your product at a wider scale. That’s why blogging can never be passé, and digital marketers should never stop pitching their clients for investing in creating quality content.

So, this was our 8th blog (in a series of 13) that tried to clear the smog covering the importance and usefulness of blogging.

Wait till next week when we’ll be coming up with our 9th blog that will deal about how to increase sales online…

The post What Is the Use of Blogging, It’s Passé. Let’s Focus on Social Media Instead appeared first on Digital Marketing School of America.



This post first appeared on Institute Of Digital Marketing, please read the originial post: here

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What Is the Use of Blogging, It’s Passé. Let’s Focus on Social Media Instead

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