Blogs are very effective and powerful lead generators. Companies that have a blog report 67% more leads that those who do not. Many people share viable articles with their friends and discuss trending topics.
Many brands have become market leaders because they’ve managed to establish their blogs as leading knowledge sources. HubSpot and Moz are great examples of this, as the companies’ blogs have become a place where marketers go to check on the latest trends or the latest articles and news.
Blogging has become a very important part of every marketing strategy that 55% of marketers say it is their top priority for 2019. Here are 6 blogging trends you need to know in 2019.
1: Articles Are Growing in Length (Google Rule!)
A small percentage of marketers write articles larger than 2000 words, but these bloggers are reporting that their content is performing around 3 times better than the average article that has a length of 1150 words. This is why, we can actually conclude that the longer the publication – the better it performs.
Google is constantly optimizing its search engine to provide users with more relevant and intent-based content. Google loves the long, high-quality, informative, articles.
Google has developed LSI (latent semantic indexing) – an algorithm that uses mathematical techniques to understands the relationship patterns between different words in your text. LSI helps Google understand the topic of your article.
To rank higher, you have to use a precise subset of keywords rather than a singular one because this helps LSI understand your article more in-depth and rank you higher for a particular search.
2: Bloggers Invest More Time per Post
Many bloggers now investing more time in producing content. That effort pays off as copywriters who spend 6+ hours on an article report two times better results than those who don’t.
Both search engines and users demanding content personalization. To make an article attract a particular kind of people (Target Audience) you need to do more thorough research, work with buyer personas, and psychographic targeting in order to personalize it.
Your overall content strategy should be optimized to achieve your goals.
Writing two thousand words is not enough anymore. You have to provide supplementary content that keeps the audience engaged and helps them better understand the topic.
Adding a video, infographics, or audio in an article helps engage more people, and it also means you may need to put even more effort and time into publishing a high-quality, lead-generating article.
3: Daily Posting
Many companies have blogs but what’s curious is that just 2% of businesses use them to their maximum efficiency, publishing a post at least once per day. However, 60-68% of those that publish daily or more regularly, report high results driven by their publications.
That’s easily explainable. To run a blog effectively, you have to invest a significant amount of resources and have people contributing to the daily publishing process. However, once you manage to post at least once per day – you slowly become a recognizable source increasing consumer dependency on your brand.
Becoming a source of daily information makes you rise above competitors, especially locally, presenting bigger market opportunities.
Another reason why blogging daily is important is that most users online are interested in time-relevant topics and demand everyday access to new content to be active readers of a blog. If users know there’s always something new to find once they visit your blog, they will dive into your content each time they require info in your company’s field.
4: Original Content
Users are not looking for something reposted that they’ve read at least 5-10 times. Especially active readers, consuming content daily and being highly engaged, are looking for articles that provide them with unique knowledge, or perspective, one that is relevant and original.
Even though original research articles have 3-times higher results, just 25% of bloggers are producing such content. That’s because such articles require excellent research skills, personal experience, and knowledge of the topic.
They’re extremely time-consuming, but original content is what establishes your image of industry-wide knowledge source.
5: Analytics
More and more bloggers are using data to drive their creative processes and 40% of those who always use analytics report strong results. This once again proves the fact, that researching your target market is an essential part of successful marketing.
Knowing users’ intent and psychographics is important if you want to answer the constantly evolving expectations of customers. Not only demographic data is important, but understanding what your target market is interested in, what are their pain points and goals, who are they following and how are they consuming content.
All of this data helps you to properly reach out and use content that appeals to users’ intent, engages and converts leads. You give them the solution they need. A pretty effective tip to become an expert!
6: Promoting Your Content
Promoting your content is a broad topic and usually based on the industry you’re in or your niche. You need to know the latest trends and what your target audience searching for.
Social media are very popular and almost every marketer is excited by its potential, it’s also a place where visual content is the king. Promoting your blog through social media could easily turn into an ineffective activity. You need to monitor how your articles are performing in social media to know whether the investment is worth it.
Paid-advertising is the most effective activity for marketers, though it’s always good to keep in mind your content strategy and where the blog fits in it to not overspend.
SEO-optimization requires much smaller investment but is a must for every blog that wants to rank higher in SERPs and get the organic search traffic from users whose intent is known and easily leverageable.
Among the most effective promoting activities is the influence of marketing. Influencers are continuing to be a 21st-century phenomenon with incredibly engaged personal audiences and are always a good choice to collaborate with for a marketing campaign.
Especially if their own image resonates well with your brand’s one.
Email marketing is still amongst the least effective practices for promoting your blog. It’s extremely hard to time the emails of all your subscribers as people are rarely active at the same time and usually get irritated if you start mailing them too often.
Email campaigns are very useful to re-engage subscribers or send your value proposition to users that have previously engaged with your emails.
Blogging can be extremely powerful lead-generating and converting marketing technique. It’s also quite useful for getting backlinks leading to your website and thus indexing the page and the site higher in SERP results.
A successful blog requires careful analysis, a very structured process, a good understanding of your marketing strategy, and unique, high-quality content.