The Painful Truth About Blogging

...For your building products brand

Blogs… do I need them? What is their function? Can they increase my specifications? I don’t get it…

According to HubSpot, marketers who prioritise blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.

But, when we speak to MDs and Sales professionals, we often get asked... why should we blog?

There are a lot of misconceptions around blogging, and when done incorrectly, they can, frankly, be a waste of time, producing very little in the way of tangible results.

So, in this post, we aim to uncover:

• The purpose of a blog post
• What they are (and most importantly, what they’re not)
• Whether you should consider them
• How you can get the most out of them

Read on to find out more…

It’s a Blog, Not War & Peace

Blogs are meant to be digested in an efficient, easy-to-read way. Specifiers should be able to skim read it and pick out key bits of information.

Over-use of technical terminology, long sentences and dense paragraphs have no place in the blogging world.

Instead, aim for short sentences, small paragraphs and simple words.

To quote Einstein,

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.”

Don’t Take Too Long On Blogging

The more time you spend agonising over every word choice and every comma, the less time it’s on your website AND the less time Google has to crawl your page.

In order for your content efforts to be successful, a consistent, regular stream of copy is what’s needed.

Tweaks take weeks!

Don’t Neglect SEO

Your blogging strategy should be rooted firmly in sound keyword research. A successful strategy will outline:

• Keywords that are obtaining significant monthly volume
• Where you currently sit in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so that you can track progress

Plucking titles out of thin air won’t deliver the website traffic you need to convert visitors into leads.

Instead, you should blog around a key topic. We call this a ‘topic cluster’.

Ideally, you should have 10-12 blogs around this topic and a 2000 word ‘pillar post’ that summarises all the blog posts (with internal links embedded!).

But, won’t that mean repeating the same things over and over again?!

Yes, there will be a crossover of themes within your blogs, but how else are you going to rank on Google? Google works on algorithms and the more you blog around a keyword, the more authoritative you’ll appear.

Great, so I can just duplicate content?

Nope, sorry. Google will penalise you for that. Instead, you’ll have to get really good at saying the same things in slightly different ways.

Don’t Get Overly Technical

Of course, in building products and construction there will be an element of technical terminology to help aid specifiers’ product research process.

However, don’t get too lost in the technical side of things. Instead, direct your readers to your website’s technical hub via a call-to-action that’s strategically placed within the blog.

Blogs form the ‘awareness stage’ of the buyer's journey, whilst technical resources form the ‘consideration/decision stage’.

If your blog does its function – which is to help you rank organically – your visitors will almost always be in the ‘awareness stage’ when they land on your blog.

People Won’t Read Your Blog Word-For-Word

It’s unlikely that a reader will make it to the end of a blog.

So, if you’ve made it this far, well done!!

But just be mindful that your readers won’t be eagerly anticipating your next publication. They won’t make a conscious effort to peruse your titles over their Sunday morning coffee.

So, try and make your key points as early on in the blog post as possible.

And always try to prompt your reader to learn more through a high-quality CTA. This might be:

• A free technical download
• An offer or discount

Or any other valuable resource that your readers might value to help them along the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

Whilst blogs are aimed to provide valuable content to the reader, let’s not forget their primary focus:

To drive more visits to your website.

So, if you’re looking to increase organic website traffic through blogging and need more expert insight, why not talk to one of the experts here at Insynth?

Good luck on your blogging journey.

ABOUT INSYNTH 

Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.  

They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.  

As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients. 

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