Once upon a time, your website got top billing. As time has gone on, it might of taken a backseat to shiny new communication channels like apps and social media. From our perspective, this can work against a company. A website is the best place to tell your brand story and to engage with your target audiences. It’s also overwhelmingly the first place that people go when researching a new product or company after they’ve typed a search term into a search engine.
Consider this: According to a study by Bright Edge, organic traffic is responsible for more than 51% of all visitors coming to websites, trumping all other sources such as paid (14%) and social (5%) traffic.
Intensifying your web presence is important. You have about seven seconds to make an impression from your homepage and capture a visitor’s attention. If the website isn’t easy to navigate, if the design isn’t appealing, you’ve lost an opportunity to connect. Websites are one of the best channels for interacting with customers and prospects and showcasing the value you deliver and the expertise and know-how of your team. It’s where search engines typically surface to so it’s critical that you’re putting the time and resources into keeping your website fresh, relevant and easily accessible for viewing across many different formats—mobile being one of the most important.
Blogging is more important than you think
Websites that also have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages and get 97% more links to their websites. Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t. This makes a compelling case for investing time and resources to build a blog calendar and recruit blog authors. It takes commitment to create a blog and keep it going.
It’s not enough to post a blog and then go dark, you have to deliver consistent, helpful and authentic content. For best results, posting once a week is ideal.
Here are some other blogging best practices to keep in mind:
- Blog posts should be more conversational, casual and approachable in tone, so the reader gets a sense of personality while still being informed about the topic.
- When choosing a topic to blog about, look to industry trends, new innovations, best practices and strategies for maximising or taking advantage of a technology solution or capabilities as themes for sharing insights with readers.
- Posts should be informative and provide practical, relevant and useful ideas to make the most of their investment.
Have you thought about launching a podcast?
As people embrace this channel more and more, it’s another way for you to share insights and your point of view in an accessible medium that starts a conversation and can increase engagement with your brand. With a focus on offering engaging content centered around being helpful, it’s an opportunity to dive deeper into how to help your target audience overcome business challenges and it builds trust.
A good b2b example is Datto’s State of the Channel podcast where they invite partners to speak on various topics and feature their success stories. This builds stronger relationships while giving listeners valuable access and practical information they can apply to their own business. It also gives a brand a voice. We’re so locked into brand content in a written form we lose the verbal connection—the conversational style and flow that doesn’t always translate in written copy. Even better, this content form doesn’t require a heavy lift or complex resources. All you need is a quiet room, a good quality microphone and an interesting topic idea. Read our blog: five reasons your campaign needs a podcast.
If you’d like help bolstering these key communication channels or launching them, we’d love to work with you. Please contact TechComms, a b2b tech marketing and communications agency on + 44 (0) 203 322 8928.
