5 Reasons Why Blog Content Is Valuable In Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
Using influencer marketing in your marketing strategy expands way beyond a sponsored social media post. While there are countless ways to work with influencers, we wanted to highlight one particular collaboration method - blog content - and why it is
valuable in the influencer marketing space.
Here we explore 5 of the reasons why blog content is just as valuable as social posts in influencer marketing and why you should invest in blog content.
1. Blog content drives SEO benefits
If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, it is search engine optimisation and helps your website rank higher in search engines. Blog posts are indexable on search engines, so they play a big role in increasing SEO benefits, especially when it comes to improving your backlink profile so you rank higher in search engines for the keywords associated with your business. For example, if a potential customer is searching for information on your brand, you want a mix of your owned content and platforms, as well as influencer and user-generated content to pop up as the top results.
Of course, consumers love to delve into the ‘About Us’ section on your website, but when searching for genuine information about you and recommendations, a review from an influencer is incredibly valuable as it is a testimonial from a well-known personality in the industry and information about your brand that is not coming directly from you.
To read more about SEO, why it’s important and how to work with SEO best practices, this article on SEO for bloggers might help or alternatively, read our guide on making your website SEO friendly.
2. Blog content is valuable long-form content
Influencer blog posts are the perfect way to let your customers and potential new customers delve deeper into the brand. Social media posts, either generated via the brand or collaborating influencers, can miss important points, or not have a strong enough call-to-action because of word and character limits or best practices for the particular platform. For example, Instagram is heavily an image-based platform with short, captivating captions, so if you want to communicate a number of key points about your brand, you won’t be able to with a social media post. Blog content is long-form content that can include text, images, multi-media, links and a number of calls to action, so readers can get a much better feel for the brand and form a personal connection with it. Long-form content also builds trust establishes authority and credibility, and as social media users become more savvy, blog content is often viewed as more authentic and genuine.
3. Blog content has a longer lifespan
The lifespan of social media posts is typically only a day or two (sometimes even a couple of hours!) as new content is published to social media platforms all day, every day, which ultimately pushes old content further down the feed and out of reach of social media users. If they don’t see it on the day it is posted, they likely never will. However, on the other hand, blog content can be constantly viewed and shared far beyond the publication date, and content can be organized and archived so it can be easily found, which ultimately gives it a much longer lifespan than a single social media post.
4. Blog content is measurable and trackable
When it comes to influencer content, it’s super important to ensure it’s reaching the right people and audience – which is why influencers can play such a big, positive role in your marketing strategy. To establish whether your influencer collaborations are reaching the right audience and ultimately converting leads, you need to be able to measure and track the success of a campaign. This is where blog posts are highly valuable as content can be tracked to measure conversions, referrals, sales, leads and ROI. Social media posts can be tracked to some extent, however, blog content that contains links to product pages is much more valuable because you can view the exact flow consumers took after reading the blog post (providing, of course you have goals and eCommerce tracking set up in Google Analytics or another analytics platform) and provide direct links to product pages and more information. A good way to help track blog content is to use unique and customized UTM tracking links when including links to your website or product pages. You can create custom UTM tracking links here
5. Blog content drives traffic to your website
The added benefit of blog is that it drives legitimate traffic to your website from an audience who is in your target market and engaged with your product, whereas social media posts drive traffic to your own social media channels, which is great, but adds an extra step in the flow to making a purchase. Driving traffic to your website ultimately pushes consumers through the next steps of the digital sales funnel, and as long as your website is optimized to convert leads, you will start seeing results from influencer blog posts. Read some of our top tips on driving traffic to your website with influencer marketing here and develop a content strategy on influencer blogs that drives leads through your sales funnel.
So, do you agree that blog posts are just as valuable as social media posts in your influencer marketing space? If you haven't used blog content before when collaborating with influencers, give it a try and test some different strategies. We'd love to hear how you go!
