It’s 2018 and smart marketers have been developing content for blogs for more than a decade. Is it too late? Should your business start a blog? Yes! Your audience is still hungry for solutions, and your blog can serve as an ongoing resource to help them with their challenges.
We’ll explore two clients who are both starting or expanding new blogs in 2018 and update this blog post with data as they move ahead.
One client is in the insurance business. They sell B2C in a business space. Insurers tend to be highly personalized organizations that depend on the personal relationships between the agent and the customer – particularly with independent agencies that can write policies across multiple carriers. Your insurance agent becomes a trusted associate – and quite possibly even an actual friend. Retention rates hover near 85-95%. A local insurance agency – boosting their business for a decade using SEO, adds a blog in 2018 because they recognize that the customers that they get through their online digital marketing efforts are BETTER clients – they buy more lines (personal, business, RV and recreational, life and health) than those they get elsewhere. Their retention rates are 95% instead of 85%. So why blog now? Simple! They can attract a higher quality client to their business and they can continue to nurture and delight their existing customers – who provide valuable referrals.
Further, SEO only works if you have a destination to send the prospect and a search term matched to content that they can seek and discover. Sending the prospects to the same dozen or so pages was an e-commerce retailer’s challenge. Our second client has an exclusively B2C online business that she was promoting using beautifully crafted Pinterest posts, highly targeted search terms, gorgeous Instagram photos and the occasional magazine review. But the problem is, she has no new content to attract new customers! By developing a blog, she can create 10X the content than her current product based web site could otherwise use to attract customers. It’s a win-win! She can stop pinning links to the same dozen products and start pinning it to valuable and useful content that nurtures sales of her products.
Aren’t we getting to content overload?
Yes and no. We’re consuming more and more of it each day – the average adult spends 7-12 hours per WEEK just on their mobile devices (not to mention workday surfing that invariably happens despite employer’s efforts to quell it for the sake of productivity.) Content is (still) king. Good content still works, and further, good content can be and should be shared to existing clients too.
Content can appeal to both a prospective client and an existing client. Take the insurance agency with clients who have home and auto policies already. If they craft an article about insurance for, say, expensive sporting equipment like fancy bicycles, that home-and-auto client suddenly discovers that that fancy bike hanging in the garage is probably not insured well enough under their standard homeowners policy and understand the reason (and the affordability) of purchasing a separate waiver. For the cost of less than two lattes per month, they can prop that fancy bike against the side of the Starbucks window and walk inside, confident that if it gets nipped, they are covered. Further, the agency can utilize this as an opportunity to engage with existing clients, who happily will share their great experiences with their friends who ask on social media. So much business happens in ‘dark social’ – places where businesses are not necessarily watching – between friends, on private groups and in messages where you can’t see (or control) the message. By using blog content, e-mail and your own social channels, your business controls the conversation around your expertise, products and services. This opens the door for your customers to share your business with others in places you can’t get to.
For a retail client, that has a limited product line with expensive and time-consuming product development, using content helps create fresh and new reasons to visit your owned space – aka, your web site. When you build a large following on social, you’re building your business on rented land. None of us control Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Pinterest. In fact, we only control what we own – and directing prospects and customers to our owned properties is essential for converting them from strangers to evangelists. Facebook’s algorithm changes and data breach challenges have reduced the organic reach significantly even for those using live video and following Facebook marketing best-practices.
Further, it extends across all their brands, including Instagram. Pinterest, which drives traffic, is a visual search engine, and despite steadily growing influence is still a fraction of total eyeball-and-thumb time on mobile. YouTube garners more young viewers, but for many marketers feels like the wild west – unknown territory with many challenges.
