Blog Tips: Increase Your Sales with a Corporate Blog

There’s nothing like feedback for giving you inspiration. Your sales force interacts daily with customers who ask questions, perhaps show reluctance to buy in, or need to share their point of view with a salesperson. What they’re also doing is helping you to improve strategy and providing a title for your next company blog.

If you don’t have a corporate blog yet, this post is definitely for you. We’ll tell you exactly why this type of regular content is a great resource for driving your business.

Blogs build proximity with your potential customers and are a perfect opportunity for positioning yourself as a reference in your sector. For example, if your target customer expresses concerns at a meeting, your response to those concerns is great material to offer a wider audience through your blog.

If you start sharing your expertise here’s what happens:

1. You start to break down barriers that exist between you and your potential customer. Whether you’re a sales manager, salesperson or business development director, sitting in front of your computer and sharing advice shows that your public and sector are important to you. If your blog grows and features posts from colleagues in different areas of your company, it will be all the richer in terms of quality.
2. High-value content will drive qualified traffic to your website. Whether it’s advice, step-by-step tutorials, or announcements of events of interest for your readers, content diffused gradually will build your audience – until followers are actively recommending your blog. The chances then increase of receiving enquiries from potential customers who have read your content, and want to find out more about your services.

If you need any more convincing, check out these statistics that illustrate the benefits of creating a blog:

Traffic: According to Hubspot, companies who blog regularly get on average 434% more indexed pages, 97% more inbound links and double their number of web visitors. This positive growth starts to kick in once you’ve published more than 20 blog entries, when traffic generated starts to increase by 30% (source: Traffic Generation Cafe).

Trust: Based on this infographic by Content Plus, 60% of consumers feel more connected to a company after reading customised content in its blog, and Custom Content Council reports they are more likely to buy from that company. 90% of people who follow company blogs consider them to be useful and 78% believe that behind the content is a company interested in building good relationships with them.

Increase in customers: B2B businesses that have an active blog generate 67% more leads per month than those that don’t have one (source: Inside View).

If this all seems like a good idea, don’t forget before launching a blog to define your keywords – select those with low competition and high search figures, and that correspond to the subjects you want to cover. The keyword planner in Google AdWords is a great tool for doing this and very easy to use. Make sure you add your keywords to image captions, meta-descriptions, titles and search engine-friendly links. This way you’ll help your readers find you more easily on the web, and by using on-page SEO optimisation you’ll increase the visibility of your website.

Once that’s completed – what next?

Well, last but certainly not least is analysing the metrics of your blog to test its success. Taking as a reference your editorial calendar, you need to look at number of visits, how long users stay on your web pages, and the bounce rate. Reader comments are also a good indicator of engagement, and if you’ve included links to additional material (presentations, ebooks or infographics), the number of downloads and recommendations on social networks should also be included in the analysis.

Your blog will not drive business by itself, but it is the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Use it to continue the conversation with your customers, build your credibility with readers, and ultimately, your blog will power your sales.