Guest Post For Beginners: How Words Are Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool
We know a lot of business owners who’ve spent a fortune funding loud, grand, and (for lack of a better term for it) borderline obnoxious marketing campaigns and received chump results in the end. After all, just because you paid more for a campaign or so-called “help from top-tier experts” does not mean that your success is guaranteed. In fact, the flashiness of a marketing campaign does not have a direct correlation to how it will perform. At the end of the day, it’s going to be about one thing and one thing only: value.
That’s right. In this day and age, consumers prioritize value above all else. Not just monetary value but informational value as well. New-age consumers tend to gravitate towards businesses that can sufficiently satisfy their need to be informed and educated before agreeing to buy a certain product or hire a particular service.
I know. Such a far cry from traditional telesales strategies and door-to-door pitches, right?
The old “bombard them with pointless gibberish until they eventually cave in” strategy no longer works for modern-day consumers. They know better than making a purchase just because a product looks fancy or because a service sounds very promising. These consumers are well-informed, cautious, discerning, and critical. They prefer to know not just the advantages but also the possible risks that come with each purchase and they make buying decisions based on the same.
Yes, Sure. They do read the fine print. So don’t even bother asking.
This is why it is to your great advantage to start adapting (if you haven’t already), newer, and by far better, principles of marketing: Transparency, Honesty, & Value-driven.
Why Should Your Marketing Be Honest, Transparent, and Value-driven?
As a business owner or online entrepreneur, it is your job to be the visionary of your business. If you are looking to build a name for yourself in your respective industry and actually create solid foundations for your brand, you must keep up with the changing demands of the market – including how to build the right connection with them.
People nowadays aren’t so easily impressed. Too many promises have been made and far too many of them have been broken. This has made the market cautious and wary of anything that sounds too good to be true. They’re skeptical and for good reason. As a business with a genuine offer, it is your responsibility, not just towards consumers but also towards your brand, to introduce it in a way that informs the buyer of what they need to know without reservations as well as set the right expectations to what they can gain from availing your offer.
Being honest and transparent is to your advantage and will actually help you build a better connection with your target market as opposed to following traditional strategies.
To take it a step further, not only should you foster trust in your market by being honest and truthful about your products and services, but you should also think of ways to provide them with free value. In this day and age, the “business to client” or “seller to buyer” relationship is no longer a one-way street. You should give as much as you receive. Instead of just focusing on what you can “take” from the customer, you should also think of ways to give back to the customer. The best way to do it is to look for ways to provide them with real value.
Studies show that consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that have helped them or educated them in some way about topics that are relevant to them. In other words, businesses that have been able to provide them with real value (read more). Let me explain this by using a common sales strategy implemented in luxury stores:
When you walk into a bridal gown shop or a Louis Vuitton store, the staff will often offer you some sort of refreshment. They’d hand you a glass of wine, sparkling water, champagne, maybe even some sweets or whatnot. While definitely appreciated, this display of hospitality is a calculated strategy. By giving you, something perceived to be valuable, they can psychologically encourage you to purchase something from them. Again, it’s the simple concept of give and take.
Provide value and expect the other party to reciprocate – not 100% of the time, but it will definitely increase the chances of the market reciprocating your efforts to provide them with what they seek. This is why value-driven content marketing has made waves in recent years. Specifically, the rise of guest posting campaigns.
What Is Guest Posting?
Guest posting is a type of content marketing strategy wherein an individual or a business contributes content to another website for publishing. I’m sure you’ve written content or had someone write content for your own website or social media pages before. With guest posting, the difference is that the pieces of content are not going to be published under your own domain. Instead, it will be submitted to someone else and posted on their own platform.
Now, you’re probably wondering WHY. Like, why on earth would you go through the trouble of making the effort or paying for a service to generate content for the benefit of another website? The answer is simple: You and your business will gain something in return by doing it.
And it’s not money, by the way. At least, not upfront. Allow us to explain it in more detail below.
How Words Can Become Your Most Powerful Tool In Marketing
Guest posting has powerful and significant advantages considering what it will actually cost you as a business to run such a campaign. If you’re confident in your writing and you know you have a lot of value to give, your initial investment to run the campaign is $0, time, and effort. If you decide to hire someone for guest post services, still your investment would be a fraction of the cost you’ll spend running a glamorous, wide-scale ad campaign. Your words alone can propel your business forward and become one of the most powerful tools you’ll have for marketing.
Here are the top 5 benefits that you can expect from running a guest posting campaign:
Top 5 Benefits Of Guest Posting:
Reach A Wider Audience
Of course, one of the biggest advantages of guest posting is having your content out there, published across different websites each having unique sets of audiences. This gives your brand or business more exposure and thus, more visibility. No matter how good a product you have or how efficient your services are, without people looking at what you have to offer, you will not be able to sell. So, before you can even prove how amazing your offer is, you first need to get customers through the door – and guest posting just happens to be a really good and cost-efficient way to do it.
By publishing guest posts on other websites, your website metrics should be positively impacted:
- Increased website visitors
- More unique clicks
- Longer website visit times (the average time visitors stay and browse your website)
Get Fresh Eyes On Your Content
Another benefit is the chance to showcase your business or brand to new customers. It’s one thing to have people visit your website, it’s another to have them fall in love with the value you provide through your content. As mentioned above, modern-day consumers love to receive free value and when they find a website that gives them exactly that, they’re sure to check out new posts every now and again.
If you only keep posting on your own website, chances are you’ll have a harder time getting new customers looking at what you have to offer. It’ll take longer for you to increase your active audience. Guest posting is an organic way to get new website visitors and social media followers.
Improve Your Search Engine Rank
Now, on to the technical benefits of guest posting. First is improving your website’s ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). When you search for a product or service on Google, a single keyword search can generate 100,000+ results – oftentimes, even more. If you do not have any SEO or Search Engine Optimization strategy, you’ll end up on the bottom barrel and get lost in the sea of results.
Guest posting is a type of SEO strategy that helps you rank higher in the SERPs. The way these rankings work is that Google (or any other search engine for that matter) tends to give the upper seats to websites that are perceived to be able to provide the most value concerning the topic a user is searching about. That being said, to rank higher, you need to become more relevant.
Now, where does guest posting fit into all of this?
When you have multiple guest posts published across different websites that are all relevant to your niche or market, this also means that you have multiple inbound links distributed across the internet. This builds a web of association between your website and others. The more inbound links your website has, the more search engines perceive that you have something of value to offer. If Google was a person, they would be asking “What is so special with this website’s content that everyone is linking to it?”
Guest posting is a way for your business’s name to make its rounds on the internet. Thus, boosting your website’s relevance to search engines.
Increase Brand Awareness & Authority
This is the unavoidable and definitely desirable aftermath of running a successful guest posting campaign. By reaching a wider audience, getting more fresh eyes on your content, and ranking higher in the search engine page results, people will naturally become more and more aware of your brand.
This is basically where all household names begin. By spreading influence and making their brand identity more known to the buying public, first to their immediate niche and later on everywhere else, they increase their authority in the market. Read more about it here: https://insidesmallbusiness.com.au/marketing/branding/how-to-create-a-brand-that-becomes-a-household-name.
In fact, many brands have survived market crashes, inflation, and economic crises because they’ve become so hedged in people’s minds that they’ve become their go-to whenever they need similar products or services they offer. Of course, these businesses are quick to adapt to changing market climates as well but it’s undeniable how brand authority has helped them keep business afloat in trying times.
Guest posting may not immediately make your brand a household name but it's a good start. The efforts you put in today will eventually compound and bring significant results so trust the process.
Build A Better Relationship With Your Target Market
Lastly, content is a great way to build a relationship with your target audience and guest posting allows you to collapse the time it takes to make your words reach more people. By providing modern-day consumers with valuable information, your business can cultivate a better relationship with them. So even if they are not customers now, there’s a good chance they will be once the right opportunity comes because you’ve already fostered a connection with them.
Say, you’re selling baby products. Not everyone is having a baby so some people who read your content about baby bottle reviews infant wear and other baby-related stuff may not necessarily buy from your business right away. However, if you continue to provide value to them, and there comes a point wherein they’re actually expecting a baby, your business will be the first one to pop into their head. All because you started cultivating that relationship early on.
Words are powerful. Content is impactful. A lot of businesses overlook the importance of good quality content because they’re too busy planning a budget for their next big ad. But the thing is, no matter how much you spend, people won’t buy from businesses they don’t trust. So while guest posting might be considered a more organic and long-term marketing strategy, it certainly will create a more lasting impression.