Blogs are playing an increasingly important role in educating prospects for lead generation that can be nurtured into sales. Your blog can be one of your most powerful marketing assets, especially if you focus on topics your prospects and customers will find most valuable and avoid the “hard sell”. Blogging adds a human dimension to your business by encouraging interaction and focusing on your customers’ agenda instead of your own.
Today, blogs are part of the customer outreach and engagement efforts of more and more businesses — and with good reason. According to the 2011 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INDUSTRY REPORT, companies that publish 15 or more blog articles per month generate five times more web traffic than companies that don’t blog. The challenge lies in creating blogs that meets your needs and also interest your target audience.
According to MarketingProfs’ SmartTools: Blog Marketing, whether you’re building a blog program from scratch or rehabbing an existing one, there is a basic blueprint you can follow to develop an effective blog, fast.
Key Steps for Senior Living Providers
SmartTools suggests adopting the following key steps for building a blog platform that will help you capture the attention of potential customers and help you achieve your strategic business objectives.
- Devise objectives for your blog that are scalable and match your business needs.
- Profile your target audience and determine what type of blog will draw them in.
- Set a budget that pairs investment to positive, financial benefits.
- Present a business case for blogging that is compelling to internal management.
- Define your “blog culture” and manage who speaks and comments.
- Find skilled bloggers within in your firm or utilize external industry experts to manage your blogging activities.*
- Build awareness of your blog as well as establish your authority and thought-leadership.
- Track metrics that measure your ROI and define your success (initially and as you hone your blog).
*For senior living communities that do not have the internal communications resources to manage a robust blogging strategy, there are top marketing agencies that specialize in the senior living industry.
Blogs boost your search engine performance by adding pages to your site and encouraging inbound links. Blogs give you a greater chance of showing up in the right search engine results and also give other sites a reason to link to you — increasing the number of inbound links and boosting your search engine rankings. To maximize your blogs effectiveness, always remember to assure that your blog content is relevant to your audience!