Which entrepreneur has never had a question that immediately required a trip to Google for an answer? Thanks to the popularity and growth in content marketing, we no longer have to wade through newspapers, magazines, and books to find what we’re looking for. Not only has content marketing changed the entrepreneur’s behavior; it’s changing the buyer’s behavior.
Today’s consumer makes decisions about their purchases in a very different way. Our friends at Business2Community outlined some very intriguing stats on your buyers that deserve attention:
- 80% of business decision makers prefer to get information in a series of articles versus an advertisement. (Exact Target)
- 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content and are also more likely to buy from that company. (Custom Content Council)
- 90% of consumers find custom content useful. (McMurry/TMG)
- 78% of consumers believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them. (McMurry/TMG)
- 50% of consumer time online is spent engaging with custom content. (HubSpot)
At the core of content marketing is your small business blog.
Blogging As a Small Business Asset
While living at the intersection of Microsoft and Amazon at the turn of the century, I first heard of this thing called a “blog”. Fun! I’m going to get one of those, I mused.
Even though it sounded like fun to have a blog for the business, we weren’t convinced of its value to our lead generation strategy. Then Hubspot shed light on what small businesses were achieving with a blog.
Take a gander at these numbers…
- Businesses with 51 – 100 pages generate 48% more traffic to their website than those with 1 – 50 pages
- Businesses with 101 – 200 pages generate 2.5 times more leads than those with 50 or fewer pages
- Businesses that blog 15 times or more per month get 5 times more website traffic than companies that don’t blog
- Small businesses with 1-10 employees tend to see biggest gains in website traffic when posting more articles
- Businesses that increase blogging from 3-5 times per month to 6-8 times per month double the number of leads generated from their website
- Business sees a 45% growth in traffic to their website when increasing TOTAL blog articles from 11 – 20 to 21 – 50 articles. B2B organizations see a 59% increase in traffic after growing the total number of blogs from 100 to 200
- Businesses with over 200 blog articles have 5 times the leads than those with 10 or fewer blog articles
My first blog article, 13 Tips to Make Time Work for You and Your Small Business, was published March 2010.
It hasn’t been smooth sailing. But, over time, blogging has evolved from nice to have to practice makes perfect; from habit formation to a strategic initiative for lead generation.
Through it all, we never gave up! We persisted through the doubts, creative bankruptcy, and writer’s block – killing off a few brain cells and racking up time with our coach – and we prevailed.
Is it worth it? You bet! You can read all about it in A Funny Thing Happened during the 30-Day Blogging Challenge…And Other Delightful Results.
However, if I had a dollar for every time I wanted to throw in the blogging towel, I could retire! Despite it all, we love blogging – and what it does for business – and we think you should, too.
Do you have a blogging story to share? We’re all ears!
