When it comes to your online marketing within social media, what part does your blog play?

please tell me you have a blog by now, right?

I’m a firm believer that any social media marketing campaign without a blog severely limits the possibilities and reach of that marketing.  The potential is watered down, and the results will leave a lot to be desired.  If you were to look at the whole of social media marketing as if it were an atom, then the blog is the nucleus.

If you’re struggling with results from your own marketing and you don’t have a blog that’s regularly updated, the results aren’t really surprising.  That’s kind of expected.  Some of you might be thinking “c’mon, a blog can’t have that much influence over my marketing results.  It’s just some random content.”

Yeeeaaah.  not so much.

First off the blog is like a big fat all you can eat SEO buffet for the search engines. Google and other search engines love the potential for a bottomless pit of content.  They will continue to consume as long as you continue to feed.  Their goal is serve the most relevant content to the users of the search engines.  That keeps people using their search engine so naturally they want people to see your content.  If your content is good enough, and relevant enough, Google will step back up to that buffet a lot and serve that content right on to the first people up to search.

Blogs are also all about engagement and interactivity.  You’ll hear us talk about that a lot when we get into dialogues about optimizing content so it’s interactive.  This is one more outlet for you to start engaging the people within your niche whether they’re other companies, vendors, customers or prospects.

Of course there’s the added benefit of becoming an authority.  In order for this to happen you need to actually push strong content but couple that great content with consistent content production and you’ll start getting listed in the search engines for what’s important.  The readers don’t care if you’re a couch jockey or NASA engineer – you’re a niche expert and it makes them want to pay attention.

With social media marketing being all about the pre-sell and not the hardsell, the blog gives you one more place to send people you meet in social networks or other venues that keeps them  moving within your sales funnel.  That extra home to send people to will help your build credibility and rapport – and it’s always nice to see your followers posting your stuff, spreading it around so that others find it and get caught up in your social media marketing funnel as well.

There are a lot of great reasons to plunk blogging down at the heart of your social media marketing campaign, a lot more than I could list here without boring people right off the page.  Just remember the power of content and how far it can take you with the right syndication and promotion.