Inbound marketing is the future. We’ve all heard it said a thousand times by now. All companies need to maintain social media accounts, blog regularly and be very active online. Informative, regularly published content will attract readers and online searches and ultimately lead to more business. That sounds about right, but is it true?
Inbound marketing Versus Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing in simple terms is just advertising. Radio ads, newspaper ads, billboards, signs on work trucks, yellow pages listings, and direct mail are all different types of outbound marketing. A primary characteristic of this type of marketing is that it costs money and it’s often difficult to measure the return on investment.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t cost anything. At least, that’s what many people think. You can put up an informative article on your website and share it on social media for free. It costs absolutely nothing, except the time to do the writing, editing and sharing.
Therein lies the problem, it’s not free at all. Inbound market has costs associated with the time it takes to get your content seen online. If you are a local restaurant or trendy shop, regular time spent on social media can be well worth the investment. However, the investment has to be weighed against other opportunities.
Blogging for Home Improvement Companies
Most marketing people have heard that they need to blog for search engine optimization. Organic searches can bring traffic to your blog and more customers to your business, but it has to be done right.
What you don’t hear the marketing gurus tell you is that writing regular blog posts without proper keyword research, onsite search engine optimization and promotion is often a waste of time.
Imagine you are a Calgary Roofing Company and you write a blog post about “metal roofing”. It’ll show up under a URL structure something like this “/blog/metal-roofing-benefits”.
There is nothing wrong with that if you have a high-traffic website with email subscribers waiting for your next article. Unfortunately, a typical home improvement company probably won’t attract a long term audience like that. People only visit a site like a roofer’s for as long as they are shopping for a roof. Even then, they are not likely to want to join a mailing list.
So what happens to that “Metal Roofing” blog post?
After a while it’ll get buried under a whole bunch of other blog posts and will unlikely to be seen by anyone.
It makes far more sense to have a “Roofing Category” on the main menu and then have a very comprehensive guide on everything you need to know about metal roofs linked from that page.
That is the type of content that content that has the best opportunity to get shared and bookmarked.
So the moral of the story is, don’t blog. Write comprehensive content and make sure you optimize it very well with a proper title, H1 tag, sub-headings with H2 and H3 tags, emphasized text and a good, keyword rich description and image alt tags. Then do some work to promote it to suppliers and partners.