To answer this question, we need to step back and ask this:
How do people discover products and services to buy online?
Word of mouth
First of all, nothing beats a recommendation from a friend or someone you respect.
Great products generate a lot of buzz on social networks and this drives sales like a charm.
That’s called word of mouth.
Social sharing is a digital word of mouth.
Guess what people will do once they learn a way of doing something via your blog post?
Post it on social media of course.
Where I’m going with this?
It’s not just the positive experience with your company and your product that can generate the word of mouth, you can also generate a lot of word of mouth with your content.
So, let’s put blog next to word of mouth too.
Google search
Whenever you’re facing a problem or have any kind of question the first place you go to is Google.
And if there’s a product or service that can solve your problem, it is very likely that it will pop up in Google search results.
Advertising
And finally, advertising is a very old and proven way to get a product in front of prospective customers.
We see thousands of ads every single day, which actually dilutes their effect quite a bit, but this channel is still quite effective none the less.
And finally, you can spend money to promote the content that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly.
It may sound counter-intuitive but quite often the content that promotes your product will have a much higher conversion rate then a sales pitch for the product.
So, let’s just put blog next to advertising.
A blog: a customer acquisition channel that ties everything together?
Do you even need a blog in order to tap into these 3 main customer acquisition channels?
Tanya Mimi from Slasher Career explains it perfectly:
“Let’s say you own an eCommerce store that sells shoelaces, like lacesout.net.
When someone buys new laces from them the chances are this person is going to brag about this to their friends and recommend lacesout.net website.
All you need to care about is to provide a positive experience with that online shop.
Pleasing your customers is all you need in order to generate the word of mouth.
Now let’s talk about search:
If I plug lacesout.net into any keyword research tool, I can see that they ran at position number 3 for the keyword “sneaker laces”, and position number 7 for the keyword “laces”, and at position number 5 for “sneaker shoelaces”, and a ton of other relevant keywords, of course.
In other words, people who search in Google for shoelaces will inevitably discover lacesout.net because it ranks quite well. And these are the best customers you may hope for, because they express their direct intent when they’re searching in Google for these things. So, search as a customer acquisition channel seems to work very well for lacesout.net.”
The main question is:
If organic search performs so well for them as a customer acquisition channels, why are they running a blog?
Because the blog post they’ve written about different ways how to tie laces ranks in Google for over 600 related search queries.
Here are some of them: “how to lace Nikes”, “how to lace Nike shoes”, “how to lace Air Max Nike”, etc.
So people search for these kinds of things in Google, they find this article at lacesout.com blog, they enjoy it, they dig deeper into lacesout.net website, and eventually they buy laces from it.
This is a perfect example of how blog can drive customers to your business from Google.
Google Analytics shows you all the essential metrics about your blog including what report shows which web pages get the most traffic and highest engagement so that you can improve your content strategy going forward.
Final words
As you can see – creating a blog can massively expand your reach on all 3 major customer acquisition channels.
This is why the interest in content marketing only keeps growing.
