Inbound Marketing Age

Let’s rewind for a moment.

It’s 2008 and blogging is 'the thing to do' in business marketing. Helping to generate website traffic, improve SEO and promote your business, the concept slowly, yet gradually, starts to gain traction.

With little competition (at least back then), it was highly effective. Simply adding pages to your site while demonstrating a sound understanding of a subject and its keywords was enough to rank.

That was of course, before the activity evolved into what we know today. And the complexities and competition in blogging now make it far harder to rank by blogging alone.

The flicking cursor taunts your tired mind and you find yourself doing everything and anything to avoid writing. Another pointless email, a quick snack... oh go on, one more coffee - then I'll make a start.

Hours later, you return to your blank page and question whether this blogging malarky is really worth it.

Sound familiar?

We've all been there. Whether you blog for your own business, outsource to a professional writer, or rely on your employees to come up with streams of remarkable, relevant and consistently well-written blog posts, burnout doesn't discriminate. Even the most talented and experienced writers suffer the dreaded yet inevitable 'bleurgh'.

With the rise of Siri, Alexa, Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice search has been promising a revolution in our digital behaviour at home and work for some time now, but has it really happened?

What’s the story?

Voice recognition has come a long way since the early days.

Remember Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella’s excruciating Cortona demonstration, where he asked the voice assistant to retrieve some data and she thought he wanted to buy some milk?

55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. But, in a world where companies are starting to think more like media publishers, are text-only blog posts still holding people’s attention?

According to one study, “91% of consumers now prefer interactive and visual content over traditional, text-based or static media.” Plus, 65% of the population are visual learners.

But this doesn’t mean we should be putting our pens down and aborting blogging altogether. And if you’re not convinced of this, I implore you to read this blog post.

It could be argued that marketing is all about telling a good story. And certainly, content marketing has storytelling at its heart.

Being able to engage the audience, bring them on board, educate them and end with a rousing call to action is effective content marketing in action.

We even live in an age where stories often seem to be more important than facts.

Given that stories are powerful tools for marketing, we should be using them in our content, but where do they come from? How can you find stories for your B2B content?

New research published last week by Backlinko has revealed some interesting insights into the types of blog posts that garner the most shares on social media.

Backlinko analysed 912 blog posts, looking at how things like content format, word count, and headlines correlate with social media shares.

We delved into the findings.

So, which types of blog posts are most shareable?

Editor's note: This post was originally written in 2014 and has since been updated for maximum relevance. 

I like to think of blog posts as arrows – powerful, accurate and effective – but only if they are targeted. In fact any weapon is only effective if properly targeted – and can cause huge damage if it’s pointing the wrong way.

Whilst forgiving the somewhat campaign/war like bent of this view, applying this analogy to a blog – you have to identify the overall nature of your enemy and then hit specific targets with your posts. So what you need is a brief and a targeting system.

So, I am making my New Year resolutions again, and one that I keep adding in is to blog smarter – blog better. It’s a great goal I’m sure you’ll agree, but where do we start?

What is the best practice? What works and what doesn’t work? If only someone published some useful stats that we could use? Oh, hang on…

 Well, wouldn’t you know it, Orbit Media Studios have published their 2018 survey of blogging statistics and trends – how helpful is that? (Check out the link for the full research).

One of the many advantages of working in an open-plan office is the opportunity to bounce around B2B blog ideas with fellow inbound content writers.

And a frequent topic of conversation is how to finesse our blog titles so they're pertinent, attention grabbing and search-engine friendly.

Why business blog titles matter

While the bulk of our creative efforts goes into constructing the blog post itself, it's surprising how much attention we also need to pay to those first few words that our potential customers are going to see - our headline.

There’s much more to blogging than just writing. Your post needs to be optimised for search and formatted in a way that’s easy for readers to digest.

The good news is that if you’re using HubSpot, their platform makes it easier for you to publish attractive and search-friendly blog posts. But it doesn’t do all the work for you. 

Well-crafted, purposeful and informative B2B blog posts are essential tools to help build your community and create the foundations for long-lasting relationships.

But in the midst of a demanding blogging schedule it can be easy to lose sight of why it is you're doing what you're doing; who you're doing it for and what it is you're looking to achieve.

In this blog post, we highlight five key questions that can help keep your content creation efforts on-task and on track.