89% of marketers included blogs in their content strategy for 2020. It’s not surprising, since you can reach your target audience through a blog and subtly advertise to them. People don’t like aggressive marketing and direct ads. Instead, they prefer blog posts that provide value, while promoting a product or service at the same time.
Blogging is a powerful marketing tool that businesses can use to increase website traffic, promote products and services, and build customer trust. A high-quality blog with useful and engaging content can differentiate your company from competitors.
If you want to succeed, you’ll need ideas and examples to scale your content marketing. We put together a list of seven ways companies use blogging as a marketing tool.
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1. Hubspot’s Topic Clusters
Every blogger, writer, marketer, or sales manager has come across the HubSpot blog at some point. It’s understandable; they have plenty of simple and useful articles related to content creation, sales, communication, customer service, and website optimization. The HubSpot blog is a treasure of useful information that always appears on the first page of search results.
HubSpot has been using its blog as a marketing tool for years. However, they eventually noticed that the number of articles they had reached a critical level. Their SEO-optimized articles on comparable topics began to compete for search engine visibility.
As a result, HubSpot decided to use the Topic Cluster model instead of the traditional SEO model, which entails the use of long-tail keywords. The Topic Cluster model is distinguished by the use of a single page (pillar page) for the primary topic, with internal links to related topics. The pillar page broadly covers the topic. Instead of long-tail keywords, pillar pages address the most important aspects of a topic and provide internal links to articles with more in-depth knowledge and long-tail keywords.
A pillar page is an authority page on a specific topic. It ranks higher on the topic it covers, while also supporting linked pages in achieving better search engine rankings. The pillar page serves as an umbrella for related pages. It’s a win-win situation for both the pillar page and all linked pages.
The Topic Cluster model keeps a blog organized, attracts high-quality traffic, and drives readers through the customer journey stages to conversion.
2. Ahrefs’ Focus on Quality
High-quality, actionable, and SEO-optimized content helped Ahrefs establish itself as an industry leader. Ahrefs is a powerful toolkit for backlinks, SEO analysis, and digital marketing that helps marketers get more traffic from search engines. The company creates simple-to-use products that help with everything connected to SEO, from keyword selection to outcomes analysis.
“We were able to create a product that promoted itself in the early stages. We grew without a marketing team in the early years because our entire focus was on the product,” said Dmytro Gerasymenko, the company’s CEO. Dmytro and his team built a high-quality product with unique data that SEO specialists wanted. They promoted it entirely through SEO forums, with no marketing or investors involved.
Ahrefs now has a blog with a number of useful articles that advertise their own product in a subtle way. In the blog, they simply show the best practices on Ahrefs to help readers improve their content marketing and SEO outcomes.
Essentially, they are demonstrating their competence in areas they are familiar with. And the thing is, they’re industry experts who are always improving, expanding their knowledge, and setting challenging goals for themselves. Their successful content strategy is the best demonstration of their tool in action.
3. Depositphotos’ Expertise
Depositphotos is a fast-growing stock content platform with photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, and music. They use their blog to build expertise in photography, design, and marketing, as well as to inspire, entertain, and educate their readers. The Depositphotos blog targets people that are involved in creative industries, from photographers and marketers to designers and artists. They take these professionals into account, as well as their pain points when creating content.
As Depositphotos is one of the world’s leading stock content marketplaces, many creative industry experts rely on their knowledge, listen to their recommendations, and look up to them. Depositphotos shares visual and graphic design trends every year. They present color trends, creative palettes, and curated collections every season. Apart from trends, you’ll find industry news, events, interviews with interesting creatives, and more on their blog.
Depositphotos aims to change people’s minds about stock photos through their blogs and projects. They want to take down the stereotype that stock photography is boring, so they’re working hard to raise awareness about and highlight authentic visuals in their library.
Depositphotos wants to honor all the talented contributors behind their visuals. This is why they create projects such as The Photographer’s Way, which share unique stories about becoming a visual artist and provide independent professionals with international exposure.
4. Zety’s Knowledge Hub
Zety is an online resume builder that makes it simple for job seekers to create a professional CV using pre-made templates. The company provides customers with the best online resume builder, as well as free professional career guidance from specialists. Zety was founded by three like-minded friends who set out on a mission to transform the HR landscape.
Zety turned their blog into a huge knowledge base that targets relevant keywords and delivers content according to the audience’s needs. On their blog, they teach you how to create and update a resume, how to match it to a specific job description, how to negotiate a salary and more. Zety also provides career advice from the company’s experts. Through useful articles, they not only help people to acquire desired jobs. They also promote their own resume builder.
Zety’s blog is undeniably a powerful and effective marketing tool. Their articles appear on the top 10 Google Organic Search results for most searched industry keywords. For example, their article “What skills to put on a resume” has over 113K monthly views, which certainly converts to leads and sales. And that’s just 1 article!
5. Adam Enfroy and the Power of Personal Branding
Adam Enfroy is a great example of how it’s possible to build a powerful personal brand through blogging. “I started this blog as a side project back in 2019 and it quickly became one of the fastest-growing blogging businesses ever created. This blog made over $1 million in under two years with zero dollars spent on advertising.” In his content strategy, Adam focuses on high-performing content, link building, and guest posting on websites with high domain authority.
Adam has started businesses and failed many times. “I wouldn’t see immediate results, get discouraged, stay behind my computer, and quit – every time. I never gave it my all. I stayed in a safe, predictable bubble, trying to distance my personality from my business” Adam explains. Then he decided to make it personal, make it about himself. “If I didn’t put my face to it, it wouldn’t matter when I quit, I thought”.
Adam started his blog in 2019 and grew it to a seven-figure business in less than two years. His secret to success is that he approached his blog as a legitimate business right from the start. In his blog, he shares everything he learned along the way.
You’ll find a step-by-step guide to getting started, the greatest free articles and lessons on blogging, blog revenue reports that illustrate how he makes money, ideas on how to outsource and scale a blogging business, links to online forums, and Adam’s favorite affiliate marketing tools.
With a business approach to personal branding, Adam was able to create a blog that has half a million monthly readers and nearly 50,000 blogging students today.
6. Content Mavericks’ Storytelling
While some businesses try to increase their traffic by targeting more keywords and producing more articles, Chris Von Wilpert assures that it is actually possible to get more traffic with less content. He prefers to follow the “less is more” approach.
Being a great storyteller, Chris wrote a blog post that made $100,000 (with $688.71 ad spend). He believes that the world is overburdened with information and you won’t have a chance with content marketing until you take a new approach. If you want to build an audience, attract followers, and start making money from your content, you need to be a content maverick. How do you become one? Chris teaches this through his blog. Content Mavericks publishes content marketing hacks, guides, best tactics and tools, platforms, templates, and more on their blog.
The Content Mavericks underline that their approach to content marketing is unique and not for everyone. Chris believes that content focused on the creation of more SEO-optimized content is an outdated strategy. It might still work for big brands with strong domain authority that they’ve built up over time, and a large audience to promote their content to. However, it is improbable that it will work for you. They suggest focusing more on creating less content with better results.
7. MailerLite’s Values and Corporate Culture
MailerLite is a website builder and email marketing tool. It caters to both small and large businesses. MailerLite’s main concept is simplicity. Their content approach is based on their product and company values.
MailerLite’s blog focuses on topics that will be of interest to their users and provide them with an outstanding product experience. On the blog, they provide all kinds of marketing advice, especially in email marketing. Their detailed approach to writing sets them apart from others. The easy-to-read blog and its clean design reflect the principle idea around their product. Email marketing shouldn’t be difficult.
MailerLite’s first company value is to focus on people. It’s evident in the way they communicate. Today, MailerLite employs a fantastic multi-cultural team of over 100 people. MailerLite incorporates team photos into its content and highlights company stories and team member social media posts.
“We want our customers to know us as people. We’re all people interacting with people” MailerLite says. They believe that their success is dependent on the success of their customers. That’s why they feature consumer stories, build communities with similar goals, and connect customers with experts and partners.
Conclusion
Even though blog maintenance takes time and effort, it has the potential to become your company’s most valuable asset. A blog can be an effective and strong marketing tool to spread brand awareness and provide value to your readers. It also does a great job of quietly promoting your company.
