Blogging is usually very clearly a marketing function, many times expected to drive traffic through SEO and being shared on social media. This stereotype makes it easy for sales-driven organizations to opt out of blogging.
“We don’t care about SEO.”
“Social media doesn’t drive leads for our business.”
and of course… “We don’t have time to blog.”
All valid statements! But there is significant value in blogging outside of driving traffic from search engines, or gaining you points with the social media crowd.
Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research gave a really amazing presentation at Callidus’ C3 conference in May, and one point that stuck with me was her debunking of statistic that buyers don’t reach out to a salesperson until they’re 60% through their purchase cycle. As we might all suspect, the salesperson is extremely important throughout the entire purchase cycle, but so is your company website, which ranks as the primary source of information for the first 60% of the journey.
In a B2B purchase, the key job of your company website is to build credibility…. I think you can see where I’m going here. Blogging is a longer-form opportunity to build credibility.
Prospects also have questions that you answer on a routine basis. There’s a new level of seriousness about a topic when it’s written in a well-thought-out blog post rather than discussed anecdotally in a meeting. If you’ve invested the time to write about a topic, then it must be important.
Additionally, it’s a great way to spread organizational knowledge from the strongest sales reps to the rest of the organization. So don’t shrug off blogging just yet, even if you’re in a sales-driven company that doesn’t care about marketing.
