This week I was interested to read an article in Content Marketing Today regarding the success a bank has had with blogging.
The following is an excerpt from that post (ok it’s the weekend time is short!):
The company under the spotlight was in a niche area – banks that were trying to get started, banks that were looking to acquire other banks or banks that were working on implementing growth strategies. According to company owner, Wendell Brock, his website,denovostrategy.com, received almost no traffic.
Wendell decided to launch a blog called, BankNotes that was integrated with his website and within a few months he went from zero traffic to 1000 new monthly visitors. About 10% of these are returning visitors and 2.5% have turned into new sales leads.
Wendell noted another benefit to his new blogging strategy, “The blog has caused me to implement a new discipline to my marketing strategy by committing to writing a blog article at least once per week. This keeps me engaged in my website and inspires me to continuously strive to make it better.” Thus, even though he is a self-confessed ‘non-marketer’, his blog forces him to think regularly about continuous marketing improvement.
What happened here? By engaging with a relatively broad universe of professionals who cared about banking issues, BankNotes became a trusted source of information. As the subset of blog readers who qualified as prospects engaged with his content, they came to trust Wendel as the expert who could solve their problems about starting, buying or building a bank. They would then take the next step to spend time on his buyer-focused website.
It’s worth noting that his blog is fully integrated with his website. Therefore, when blog readers are ready to consider becoming customers, his comprehensive website content is readily available to provide all the information they need to make a buying decision.
Summing up: Your website is necessary but not sufficient to draw in prospects before they are ready to do serious buying research. Your blog will engage a broader audience that will return again and again. An important subset of this audience will be ready to buy from you because you have effectively engaged them early on with relevant and compelling information.
**The case study regarding the bank was published in a new book entitled Marketing 2.0: Bridging the gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing
Could your business benefit from a blogging strategy?