In 2020, is blog posting still relevant?

As we say farewell to 2019, is it time to say farewell to blogging? Not according to our data. Blogging remains one of the most impactul forms of content in your digital marketing toolkit.

Generating fresh, relevant, and useful content is the cornerstone for many businesses’ digital marketing strategy.

Content can take many forms, and with the growth of podcasting and audio content, video content, short-form and long-form content, there is one question marketers should be asking: is blogging still popular, effective, and relevant as a digital strategy?

Each year I undertake a review of Optima’s blogging content. I reflect on what has worked well and what could be improved, and measure the impact of blogging on our overarching marketing objectives. Most importantly, an annual review of your blog content should guide and shape your content planning for the coming year.

10 key metrics for measuring the relevance and effectiveness of your blog

1. Lead generation: Content generating the most leads and enquiries, and most importantly, causing the phone to ring
2. Conversion: Generating the greatest number of “most desired responses,” like data capture through form completion, or an email newsletter signup
3. Acquisition: Traffic from the search engines, with the blog post acting as a landing page
4. Social engagement: Shares, likes and comments on social networks
5. Email engagement: Best performing content across the email platform
6. Website and brand engagement: Pageviews per visit, bounce rate, comments
7. Thought leadership: Mentions and inbound links from other high-quality websites
8. Brand awareness: Number of times the blog post has been read
9. Best fresh content: Newly written posts, topical and fresh for your readers
10. Best evergreen content: Long-lasting, useful content that does not go out of date

Blogs for lead generation

Lead generation… it’s the holy grail for most B2B and B2C digital marketers.

Measuring lead generation activity is a combination of quantifiable metrics. For example, enquiry forms submitted, combined with qualitative measures, such as getting your sales teams to ask prospective customers how it was they made the decision to buy from your business.

For this year, I am using our telephone tracking data that integrates with our website. In other words, we are measuring which piece of content actually caused the phone to ring and as a result, we had a conversation with a prospective customer. We are able to measure the number of phone calls right in our Analytics.

Reviewing our telephone tracking data, it is clear the content that generates the most phone calls is where we freely give away our advice in a range of how-to articles, helpful articles, where we share our expertise.

Blogging to support your SEO strategy

Google loves professional blogs. Fresh, relevant, useful content. Written by you, an expert in your field.

If you are looking to gain rankings in the search engines, and drive traffic to your site for users searching for specific content that is helpful to them, then blogging remains as relevant as ever, as our analysis of our own Google Analytics demonstrates.

Over the course of 2019, we had well over 10,000 clicks from the Google search engine straight to a number of our high ranking blog posts.

And the single post that got the most clicks straight from the search engine results page in 2019 was our CEO, Anthony Godley’s post Using Instagram for Business.

Blogging as a thought leadership activity

One excellent quality signal you are generating great content is when other high-quality sites cite your content and create a link to your content as a recommendation.

By definition, these links are created by a human who is curating great content. For example, the University of Illinois’ online Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme selected one of our recent posts for their Digital Media and Marketing Strategies module written by CEO, Anthony Godley, A beginner’s guide; how to pitch to a journalist.

And our content is regularly selected by industry experts in our field for inclusion in their roundups. In particular, our expert blog posts are regularly featured in industry-leading publications like Search Engine Roundtable.

Blogging integrates with social media

Our social media content strategy incorporates sharing stories about career opportunities (which gets the greatest social traction), the events we organise, and then we also regularly share out our blog content.

There are a number of measures you can use to measure the effectiveness of your blog content when it comes to social media:

• Amplification: the number of shares and likes, taking into consideration the amount of activity on each network
• Engagement: the number of comments
• Traffic: the number of clicks from social media back to the blog content on your website

And one other great measure is the reputation and quality of the individuals engaging with your blog content via social media

Engagement with your blog content

Engagement with your blog content can be measured in a number of ways.

For example, how often does the blog post then encourage the reader to click through to another article on your site, thus reducing your bounce rate?

What is the average time spent reading the post?

Of our top 10 posts for 2019, our readers spent the most time reading; How Search Engines Operate.

And that is just for starters…

You should have plenty of ideas from just these examples for how you can be using blogging within your marketing strategy.

But there are plenty more opportunities to drill down and look closely at how your blog is performing. Which blog posts get the most interaction from your email newsletter readers? Which evergreen blog posts have you updated that are once again high performing?

Be sure to share your ideas with how you measure your own blog effectiveness…

Anthony Godley | Digital Innovation, Digital Governance & Digital Transformation for 2020

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