It’s a good question.
However, the answer—like so many things in marketing—is a bit more complex than just yes or no. It depends on your budget and your blog objectives. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of boosting specific blog posts.
What it Means to Boost a Blog Post or Web Page
First, let’s review what it means to pay for boosting a post. Facebook and most other social media sites will allow you to boost any post. You can set a daily advertising budget and whittle down your target audience based on geography, demographics and identified interests. You could also use Google Adwords or other online advertising outlets to boost a specific page on your website. That could be a blog post you think is engaging, a targeted landing page or just your general home page. For this article, though, we’re just talking about boosting specific blog articles.
There’s no doubt that paying extra to boost a blog post will garner more exposure for that article. As long as you have an interesting headline and tease copy, you will get some click-throughs. If more exposure for your company is your primary goal, then boosted posts are worthwhile. You will get more visitors to your site and that’s a good thing.
On the other side of the coin, if your objective is to generate sales, you will probably want to focus your efforts on a call-to-action oriented landing page rather than a regular blog article.
The Purpose of Blogging
At NextGear Marketing, we don’t view business blogging as a direct sales tool. It’s a long-term marketing strategy, not a short-term solution that will get you a ton of calls overnight. Over time, your blog will help you build up your brand exposure, customer loyalty, industry credibility and, obviously, SEO appeal through engaging, substantive content that’s posted on a frequent basis.
A landing page will allow you to be more sales-oriented and focused on creating a call-to-action from the consumer. Next week, we will focus more on how to build an effective landing page.
Sales vs. Engagement
If your blog is too salesy, it just won’t be as effective. Yes, you definitely want to incorporate some call-to-action in the articles. Just follow our blog and you’ll see NextGear Marketing is always referenced with some sort of “contact us” line toward the end of each post.
That said, the quality of the content should always come first with a blog. It should be engaging and/or informative, otherwise nobody will read the articles and you won’t develop any consistent followers. Any call-to-action is secondary or should be subtly incorporated into the story. Though they will happen, you typically don’t want to expect a lot of direct sales to come from your blog. That line of thinking will lead to a poor blog strategy in our opinion.
So, going back to the original question. Boosting blog posts you think will garner a lot of interest from your customer base is a good idea if your main focus is to generate more exposure for your company. If immediate sales is the only priority, then come back to NextGear Marketing next week for insight on creating powerful landing pages.
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