By 
Nearly any company website you visit today has a blog section. Businesses have long known that regularly publishing online content helps you build your digital presence and present yourself as an authority in the field. By now, you’re probably sick of hearing the old expression, “content is king.”
According to a 2018 HubSpot survey, 60% of marketers believed that blogging delivered them their highest quality leads. It also resonates well with consumers, with 70% of B2B buyers reporting that they prefer learning about companies through informational content rather than traditional advertisements.
Creating quality blogs allows you to engage with your audience and help them learn and digest valuable information. The people you attract through blogs are those who have shown genuine interest in researching your industry and potential solutions to their pain points. They can become excellent sales qualified leads and benefit your business.
When you’ve put the work into creating an excellent blog post, you want it to continue engaging prospects and driving leads long after its publication. Fortunately, there are strategies that you can use to drive your content marketing ROI.
Build your search engine presence
One of the most significant benefits of producing high-value blog content comes from the digital presence you can build online. Creating content that ranks highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) boosts your visibility and therefore lead generation. As you draft your blog content, make sure you fully utilize SEO capabilities to attract attention to your post.
As you properly optimize your content, you will find that you also increase organic traffic, engagement, and interest on the page. This activity, in turn, tells the search engine that your page provides value, which further helps to boost the rankings in the SERPs.
The strategy is cyclical. The better your content, the better your SERP rankings. The better your SERP rankings, the more traffic you receive and the longer your blogs continue to pay off.
To maximize your page’s discoverability, follow these best practices:
- Research topics of interest for your audience to identify important keywords.
- Incorporate the keywords, along with semantically related keywords, naturally into the content.
- Focus on creating high-value content that emphasizes your authority, expertise, and trustworthiness on the topic.
- Use tools like Schema.org so that the content can take advantage of any available rich snippets that it might qualify for.
Craft evergreen content
The next important strategy lies in the type of content you create. Some of the material you write for your blog will come with an expiration date. For example, writing a piece to update your audience about annual developments in the B2B technology industry will likely attract strong readership during that specific year.
Try to make the bulk of your content marketing campaign centered around evergreen content. This material will provide value long after publication because the information should not expire or change for a while. Writing this type of content helps you to attract a consistent audience and establish your business as an authority in the sector. Use research to inform you about topics that would qualify as evergreen.
As you produce evergreen content, sometimes you may need to do a brief update to the piece, such as to update a statistic. Brief updates or quick “refreshes” are fine — and even encouraged. But if you regularly find yourself dedicating significant resources to updating old blog content, it may be time to rethink your content strategy.
Take advantage of social media and email
Remember that as long as a blog still applies to customers and offers value, you can use social media and email to promote it. Use social media to call attention back to your past posts, particularly when trends or interests indicate that people may want to read about that particular topic.
Similarly, if you have sales qualified leads who might benefit from a particular blog post that was written 2 years ago, don’t be afraid to send it over — either via one-to-one emails or an automated lead nurturing campaign.
Using these promotional ideas can help your content receive consistent traffic and keep it at the forefront of consumers’ minds.
Make sure posts are well linked to the rest of the site
As you develop content for your site, creating internal site links is critical. Linking between different pages on your site offers a host of benefits.
- It helps Google understand how the pages relate.
- It ensures that the search engines can find all the important pages on the domain.
- It encourages those browsing the site to click through to other pages.
Regular links will make it easy for people reading related content to click through to the piece to learn more. Links also ensure that the page does not get buried and forgotten about by search engines.
When you put resources into your content marketing strategy, you want to know that your target audience will continue to appreciate that content for months and years to come. When your older blog pieces can still offer tremendous value, you have a few different ideas and strategies at your fingertips to build a strong marketing ROI.
To learn more about how you can take your marketing to the next level, read about our success with one of our B2B technology clients here. 
