By: Christine Siebert
Think about the different marketing channels for your company. What are your main goals? Retaining new customers and keeping your current customer base? How does each marketing channel acquire new leads for your sales team? Currently, you have a website to showcase your company and products with a few Call To Actions (CTAs) that your prospects can fill out to find out more about your products or get in touch with a salesperson. But how do they find your website?
Nowadays, prospects/customers have come to find information about products, services and challenges they face in the industry by turning to the almighty search engine. They trust the information they find, and your company needs to be the one providing that trust-worthy information. So, you need a strategy that convinces your prospect/customer of your value in the wire harness industry. This is where a blog becomes relevant for your wire harness company.
A blog builds your authority online and is something that is completely under your control. With an influential blog, you will be able to obtain leads, build up email lists and educate your audience. Search engines love content, the more content the better. It makes it easier for your audience to find your company and products. If you show your value through interesting and informative content, then you’ll show your audience that you’re not only selling products but are involved in the industry. You will develop loyal customers, willing to trust your company and place an order.
The first step in your blogging strategy is to clarify your key messages, the needs of your customers, and your company’s priorities. Below are some additional tips for your blog.
- Become an educational leader: Show your audience that you’re involved in the wire harness industry. Share your expertise and position yourself as a trusted resource. Offering insights on trends in the industry prove to your audience that you are integral part to this industry.
- Provide additional in-links to products and services: The most important pages on your website are your products and services so don’t be afraid to link to them. Building links within your blog is vital. The more links to these pages means the more traffic that will be directly driven there, and a major component of search engine rankings involves in-links from reputable and relevant sources.
- Updated blog content means returning visitors: Most company’s website content is relatively static. New products may be added but no other content, which causes the website to rank lower in the search engines. Every time you add a blog post, you are adding a “page” to your website. Keeping your website fresh and help improve the website’s visibility to the search engine.
- Blog content can be repurposed for other channels: Interesting pieces of blog posts can be used on social media. Images can be optimized for the search engines. Also, marketing assets you may already have, such as, webinars or whitepapers can be repurposed into a blog post.
- Boost conversion rates: Every blog post written is a chance to create a new lead. At the end of the blog post encourage your audience to react to a call-to-action. This CTA can be to download something, check out your product page, fill out a free trial request, and more. These leads will most likely create profit for your company.
Blogging needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy. First and foremost, you want to create an amazing blog and that does take work. Some of the things to think about are:
- What are you going to write about?
- When will you write the blog posts?
- Who is your target audience?
- What optimization have you done to the content?
- Who is the team that will write the blogs?
The last item is very important. You can assign different team members in different areas of your company to write blog posts. What are their areas of expertise? It is not just the equipment, product, or service, but the application of it. You sell what your customers see in terms of benefits, improvements, savings, quality, avoidance of risk, etc. These are some of the most important items to blog about.
Blogging can be very time consuming so sometimes hiring a professional to assist with writing the blogs is needed. Finding the right writer is important. Someone who understands the wire harness industry.
Siebert Consulting Group provides marketing services to the wire harness industry. If you are interested in learning more, please visit our website www.siebertcg.com or call us at 630-299-9121.
This article can be found in the Nov/Dec Issue of Wiring Harness News.