3 Reasons Your HubSpot Inbound Marketing Strategy Needs Blog Posts

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At the core of inbound marketing, which HubSpot has perfected over the years, is the concept of the customer coming to you. “Inbound” means that prospects are seeking you out vs. outbound methods that chase down prospects with “interruption marketing” that doesn’t necessarily reach them at the right time or place.

(JONES is a HubSpot-certified partner agency, with experience designing and implementing inbound marketing strategies and programs for clients in healthcare, technology, financial services, education and other industries.)

Instead, an inbound marketing strategy is focused on having the information prospects are seeking available for them when they search it out. A business blog is one of the key ways of continually providing informative content to prospects when and how they want it. And a business blog is at the center of the inbound marketing philosophy. Here’s why.

1. Blog posts attract visitors and improve search engine rankings.

Well-written blog posts, focused on topics of interest to a business’s customers, have the potential to draw prospects in at precisely the time they are looking for information: when they enter a question, word or phrase into a search engine.

The phrase they search might be:

“braces vs. Invisalign”
“what health expenses qualify for flex spending”
“improving email response rates”
“how to reduce home energy costs”
“online bachelors degree”

Or any number of queries that involve your business, whether your business is an orthodontia clinic, a pharmacy, a marketing agency, a home renovation service, a technology startup, or a private college. In order for your blog to attract visitors — the right visitors — it has to address the concerns of your top prospects.

The more blog posts you have, focused on the most relevant topics, the more visitors you will attract. And visitors can turn into leads.

1.a. Blog posts boost SEO through keyword placement.

When you write blog posts about the topics that interest your customers and prospects — ways of addressing their challenges and needs, research related to their business or yours, opinions and insights regarding industry changes or future predictions — you will naturally be using some of the phrases they are most likely to search. These keywords and phrases signal to search engines the focus of your individual blog post, webpage and your overall website is.

In addition to the way keywords will naturally be used in your writing, blog posts offer opportunities for more specific keyword placement to aid in search engine optimization, including in web page metadata, in headers and subheads, in image file names and alt text, and in the URL itself. (Take a step-by-step approach to optimizing each page of your website, including blog posts, with our On-Page SEO Template.)

In this way, blog posts are an integral tool in your HubSpot or inbound marketing strategy for ensuring you are attracting visitors to your website through organic search.

HubSpot’s blogging and content management tools provide resources for monitoring your keyword placement and analyzing which keywords have a high search volume or a high likelihood of placing in the top search results.

1.b. Blog posts boost SEO through increased web page traffic, the time visitors spend on your website and backlinks to your site.

While keywords were once, in the early days of search engines, a primary determination in how your page ranked in search results, today’s algorithms give a lot of weight to “user signals” that provide an indication of the value visitors find on your website.

Websites with a high bounce rate, or where visitors spend very little time, lose ranking compared to those where visitors routinely visit multiple pages or spend significant amounts of time on the site. A well-written business blog encourages both more time on the site or page (as they read the post), and more pages visited on your website (because you provide links to additional related posts and to landing pages for relevant downloadable offers).

Side note: Of course, not all of your visitors will find you through search. Some will reach your blog posts via social media links — because you will promote your blog posts on social media. Some will find you when friends, employees, customers and prospects share posts by email or social media — because you will make your blog posts easy to share. Some will come directly to your blog after hearing about it through others means, such as at trade shows or through others in your company who include links in their email signatures or send posts specifically to contacts they think would benefit from the information.

2. Blog posts build your corporate brand and image as a thought leader for your industry.

When visitors to your website discover high quality content in your business blog, they develop an image of your company as a reliable resource. Using your business blog to show the quality of your work, the depth of your expertise, and the commitment you have to helping your customers and prospects solve their problems is much better than telling them you have that expertise and commitment in ads and promotional emails.

If you become the source they turn to for educational and reliable information, you are more likely to be the source they turn to when it is time to make a purchase.

Your blog can also benefit your public relations efforts, as 88 percent of journalists typically research companies online before reaching out to them as a source for information when writing about industry topics. More than a third visit the company’s blog. (See our infographic: What Journalists Want In PR Pitches & Press Releases.)

3. Blog posts provide call-to-action opportunities.

Of course, if you are implementing an inbound marketing strategy and using HubSpot’s capabilities for online lead generation, your blog is essential as an opportunity for placing calls-to-action for your downloadable assets and other offers.

These calls-to-action can include a simple in-text hyperlink to the landing page for a related offer, a direct textual CTA saying something like “Click here to download our Complete Guide to Designing and Executing Calls-to-Action” (yes, that really is a CTA for one of our helpful ebooks) or an image-based sidebar or banner CTA, slide-in, or pop-up.

The key in all of these cases is to include CTAs for relevant offers. For example, if the blog post is about controlling healthcare expenses, link to offers that help your readers do that, such as a list of options for purchasing prescriptions at a lower cost without insurance, or a template for tracking expenses to itemize on taxes.

You can find more in-depth information about using CTAs in blog posts to drive inbound marketing and lead generation in these articles:

You can see why a business blog is essential to inbound marketing and implementing a lead generation strategy in HubSpot, but there are still questions to be answered:

How many blog posts do I need?

HubSpot says companies that publish 16+ posts/month get 4.5 times more leads than those who post only once a week.

How much time should I budget for blog writing?

We estimate a well-researched 800-word blog post will take 4-10 hours to write, depending on whether the post is developed from repurposed content or written from scratch.

How do I get started?

Download our HubSpot Implementation Timeline & Planning Template for a year-long plan to getting your HubSpot strategy off the ground.

What if I need help?

Review our HubSpot Agency Checklist for a list of criteria to consider in choosing a partner agency. Or request a consultation; we’d be glad to talk with you about your blogging, inbound marketing and HubSpot needs.