No, Your Blog Won’t Close You Any Deals
Caid Christiansen•Let’s clear something up.
No: your blog won’t close you any deals.
If you set out to blog and build a content marketing program expecting to close dozens of deals directly from your blog, you’ll soon be sorely disappointed.
Sure, your blog might land you an occasional form conversion or phone call–at which point your sales team can take over and nurture this well-qualified lead. But if the only thing you want to see from your blog is more closed deals and sales, you’re blogging for all the wrong reasons.
But don’t just take our word for it. Consider a recent study of B2B buyers which found that only a very small percentage of buyers said their purchase decision was directly influenced by company blogs. Blogs just don’t make a great direct sales tool.
So why do it? Why go through the everyday slog of creating and publishing new content?
It’s simple: SEO. Blogging is the new Search Engine Optimization. It’s how you get found.
Yes, there’s more to SEO than just writing content. You need to have your site plumbed correctly and you need to make sure you have a firm grasp on what exact search terms you’d most like to be found for. But all of the SEO strategies we’ve designed, executed, and managed for clients in the last few years have been built around great content.
Publishing interesting, helpful, detailed content kicks off the purchasing decision process by doing the most important thing there is to do: getting your name out there. You’ll show up in search results which gets prospects through the door. From there, everything else you’ve set up–your website, your demos, your contact forms–falls into place. Prospects can self-educate using your posts, which brings its own unique value to the sales process.
Ultimately, then, “more sales” from blogs is just not the point. Blogs exist to help you get found by prospects when they search for a solution, and then educate them after they find you.
Selling comes later–and that counts on you having your entire marketing strategy lined up. Blogs are there to kickstart the process.
Leave a Reply