“According to the experts, a blog will solve all your Internet woes. Blogging will increase your traffic, expand your audience, improve your engagement, position you as an authority, and allow you to shape the message in your space. So should you blog?”
Source: moz.com
If you’re uncertain whether blogging is the right content marketing format for you, this post on the Moz… blog by Isla McKetta does a great job at listing the few exceptions and nailing down the benefits.
Long story short, if you’re in B2B marketing, the answer will be yes with only a few exceptions as she explains in a very clear and direct way.
But to add to her points, I would expand on the following questions that I see correlated and often asked:
1. What is better: your blog vs social media pages?
A couple of years ago, some questioned the value of having your own blog when you could easily create pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and now Google+.
But last year, the brutal decision by Facebook to cut organic reach of pages reminded us that you can’t build your content marketing castle on rented lands. While Facebook and other social networks certainly made it easy to create these pages, they don’t have value without traffic and the message from them is that this traffic will not be free anymore.
For your Content Marketing to be efficient, you needs your own content hub, a place where you can regroup all your created content as well as curated content, a place where your can bring in not just your social media followers but also your search engine visitors and convert them. This is the only way your content marketing can deliver measurable results in terms of:
– traffic,
– SEO,
– and lead generation.
A blog is a good candidate for that as marketing expert Jay Baer noted.
2. What works best: your content or other people’s curated content?
Making a blog your content marketing hub doesn’t mean being exclusively about you or about your created content only.
Publishing curated posts (like this one) by adding your perspective to existing content and mixing content creation with content curation on your blog is a great way to scale your content marketing while adding third-party credibility to your content.
For more on how to do this right, read our guide on how to best add curated content to your blog.
3. What is more impacting: text or visual content?
So how about the fact the Web is more and more visual? We’ve all read that humans process images faster and that for marketers, it means that images become critical. Should that mean YouTube, Pinterest or Instagram are better than a blog for content marketers?
No.
First for the same reason as in #1: you don’t own your YouTube channel in the same way you control your blog or a branded Scoop.it page.
But also because images and videos are embeddable. Which means you can leverage both a presence in YouTube or SlideShare and also publish the content in your own blog. You can benefit from organic distribution (while it lasts) from these platforms (here’s our own results with SlideShare) but also publish your video and image content embedded in your blog post where again, they will contribute to your SEO, traffic and conversions.
To conclude, Content Marketing is the opportunity – or perhaps the obligation – for companies to become media. Rather than buying ads from existing media, marketers can now build their own niche media and publish content that their audience wants to read. Of course, there are various kinds of media: back in the last century, we had TV, radios, newspapers, magazines… But in today’s Web dominated by search and social media, blogs are one of the best media formats there is for B2B Content Marketers as they’re easy to share and ideal for SEO.
If you want to get 30 effective techniques to master content marketing along with valuable insights from 10+ influencers like Mark Schaefer, Rebecca Lieb, Lee Odden, Jason Miller or Ian Cleary, download our free eBook now!
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