Benefits of having your corporate blog on HubSpot

A corporate blog on HubSpot does more than publish articles. Because it lives inside the CRM, every post connects to analytics, calls to action, SEO recommendations, social publishing and contact records, so a company can see which content attracts visitors, which converts them into leads, and which leads become customers.

Picture a marketing director in a budget meeting. The company has published articles for two years, the team is proud of the library, and the chief financial officer asks a direct question. Which of these articles has produced a lead, and which lead has produced a sale? If the blog lives on one platform and the contacts live on another, the honest answer is a guess. That gap is the reason why the choice of platform for a corporate blog is a business decision and not only a technical one.

Blogging is used to nurture your audience with valuable content, but also to attract people to your website, and it is a fundamental part of Inbound Marketing. Once a blog is implemented and contains different publications, how do we generate reports, see conversion rates and clicks, and even track those customers? These options are provided by a CRM like HubSpot. This article covers what a blog is, the benefits of blogging for your business, what the HubSpot blogging tool allows, and the advantages of implementing a corporate blog in HubSpot.

What is a corporate blog?

A blog is a publication of text, images and, sometimes, videos and downloadable content. It has a basic structure of introduction, development and conclusion, and its purpose is to inform those who read it. The idea of having a corporate blog is to create content that your company's audience will want to read and also share. Through these publications you can inform and educate people, in other words nurture users so that they can become leads. This works in combination with the right marketing strategy.

In the Ultimate Guide, 10 steps to create a blog that delights you can learn more about the construction of a blog and its characteristics. If you want to go deeper into the content approach behind it, What is Content Marketing? explains how a blog fits in a wider strategy.

What are the benefits of writing a blog for your company?

Blogs increase the probability that your page appears in search engines. The reason is that they organize content around keywords and include links that redirect to other pages, either of your own company or of others. Each publication means a new page for your company's website, which increases the chances of appearing in search results, and it also gives more people something to read and share. This increases your company's search ranking. A longer introduction to the topic is available in What is a blog and why you should have one?

Another important benefit is that you can share content with your leads depending on the stage of the buying cycle they are in. If they are in the Discovery stage, you can help them understand their problem and the options available. If they are in the Consideration stage, you can share why your company would be the right one to solve it. If they are in the Decision stage, you can show the benefits of your product or service and what it is like to work with you. A blog that covers the three stages gives a prospect a reason to keep reading and to come back.

Social networks are usually the first channel a company adopts to make itself known, and they help bring traffic to your site when you use them to share your publications and invite users to visit your page. By nurturing users you can move from visitors who come to your page only occasionally to leads, which means you can generate customers through blog posts. A large percentage of the visits to company websites come from search engines, social networks or links from other sites, so if you have a good UX, you are going to get excellent results.

A very important aspect of blogging is that it helps to create customer loyalty. It helps the company maintain a relationship with customers, who can recommend publications to others and even attract more leads for your business. Every time you publish a blog, you have one more page that attracts people to your website, and even posts published many years ago continue to attract users. This will help your SEO and, as a consequence, the return on investment. Finally, blogs generate trust towards your company and, consequently, sales opportunities.

The idea that older posts keep working is supported by HubSpot's own research. In a study of its blog, HubSpot reported that compounding posts, which are articles that eventually draw more traffic than they did soon after publication, make up about 10% of a blog's posts but generate 38% of its total traffic. The same study found that one compounding post brings in as much traffic as six regular posts, and that posts of more than 2,000 words earned 4.3 times the social shares of posts between 501 and 1,000 words. The lesson for a company is that a blog is an asset that gains value over time, as long as it is maintained and updated.

What does HubSpot's blogging tool allow?

First, let's talk about what HubSpot is. It is software in which you can connect your company's teams with your customers and other platforms, and when you make that connection HubSpot works as the CRM. HubSpot CRM has the great advantage of bringing together customer service, marketing, sales and operations tools in one place. If you want to understand why this matters for the relationship with customers, read CRM, the ideal platform for customer management.

HubSpot is an ideal channel to grow your data. You collect information from your audience and can start analyzing it to create targeted marketing campaigns and special content. You can also use a call to action in each publication to capture the information of your users and pass them to different lists depending on the characteristics they have in common, so you can start to nurture them directly. HubSpot's own description of its blog product says you can insert relevant, personalized calls to action to convert blog visitors into subscribers and leads.

From HubSpot you can create the blog and add images, videos, tables, links and anchors. For blogs, you can use a template so that all of them follow the same format, which creates consistency for your brand. In addition, the different services offered by HubSpot give you an omnichannel approach. From the same place you can publish to social networks and your website, and you can see statistics such as clicks, times opened, and which countries or places read more of your blogs, and then use that information to build marketing strategies. According to HubSpot's blog product page, the tool also offers on-page SEO recommendations to help posts rank for target keywords, built-in analytics that show which posts generate traffic and leads, a connection between the blog and the CRM so that reader interactions can be tracked, scored and nurtured, and the option of connecting the blog to social media accounts.

It is an easy to use tool in which you can constantly improve the user experience, and it also tells you how to improve your SEO and lets you see your reach, among other things. You can keep the data of your contacts, which you get through a call to action that redirects the user to a downloadable and asks for their data in exchange. You can keep these lists of people in order, give them a score or lead score, and continue to nurture the leads through other marketing strategies. If you want to see how this plays with search performance, How to create an SEO strategy on HubSpot describes the process in detail.

What are the advantages of a corporate blog on HubSpot?

As indicated in the points above, having the blog on HubSpot is an advantage because you can index the content with other publications, whether they are inside or outside your website, which increases traffic to your page. Once you have several publications you can see the statistics of your audience, get to know them and improve your strategies to attract the right people.

HubSpot allows you to create blogs on a platform in an easy way, with the use of templates so that the entire site follows the same design line. The content can be shared from the same tool to different media such as the website and social networks, creating omnichannel. You can obtain information from users and make data lists to convert them into leads, keep nurturing them and turn them into customers. In addition, the CRM lets you visualize SEO strategies, since it shows what is currently working to attract traffic to the web and also shows the improvements that need to be made so that traffic keeps growing.

HubSpot is a very powerful tool, with benefits in all aspects of the company, from lead capture, automation and customer service to the marketing and sales area. Having your blog in this CRM is a plus, and as mentioned above, you gain omnichannel and ease of use for your employees. To see how ICX applies this in real projects, read Case study, HubSpot implementation at CASIO UK, and for a wider view of the platform, What is HubSpot and why is it the best CRM for your company?

Which mistakes reduce the value of a corporate blog?

The first mistake is to publish without a clear reader. A blog written to talk about the company, instead of answering the questions of the people who might buy from it, attracts few visitors and converts fewer. The second is to publish without a next step. An article that ends without a relevant call to action wastes the attention it has just earned, and the visitor leaves without leaving any data that the company can use to continue the conversation.

The third mistake is to treat each article as a one time event. As the compounding research suggests, the articles that matter most are the ones that keep working, so they deserve periodic review, updated information and new internal links. The fourth is to measure only visits. Traffic is a useful signal, but a company should also follow the leads, the opportunities and the customers that come from content, which is only possible when the blog is connected to the CRM. The fifth is to leave sales out of the conversation. Salespeople know the objections customers raise, and those objections are the best source of topics for the Consideration and Decision stages.

How should a company measure the results of its blog?

A practical measurement model has three layers. The first layer is attraction, which includes visits, sources of traffic and the pages that rank for the keywords that matter to the business. The second is conversion, which covers the share of visitors that fill in a form or download an offer, and the contacts that enter the lists created for nurturing. The third is revenue, which connects those contacts with opportunities and closed business. HubSpot's built in analytics are designed to show which posts generate traffic and leads, and the CRM connection lets the team follow the contact beyond the first form.

Whatever the indicators, the rhythm of review matters. A monthly meeting between marketing and sales to look at the top articles, the weakest calls to action and the leads that stalled is usually enough to improve the blog steadily. Over time, the team builds an editorial calendar based on evidence and not on intuition.

What this means for the C-level

For a chief executive, the corporate blog is one of the few marketing assets that grow in value after the money has been spent. A campaign stops producing when the budget ends. An article that ranks and is kept up to date continues to bring visitors. Putting that asset inside the CRM means the board can see its contribution to pipeline instead of only to page views.

For a chief marketing officer, the main advantage is attribution. When contacts, forms, calls to action and content live in the same system, it is possible to know which articles are present in the history of a customer before the first sales conversation. For a chief revenue officer, the blog becomes a source of context for the sales team, who can see what a prospect has read before they answer a call. For a chief financial officer, a single platform reduces the integration cost and the manual reporting that appears when content, email, forms and CRM are connected by hand. The decision is not whether to publish, but whether the publishing is connected to the way the company measures growth.

What can you do on Monday morning?

Start with an audit of what you already have. List the ten articles that receive the most visits and check for each one whether it contains a call to action, which offer it points to and how many contacts it created in the last quarter. If the answer is zero for most of them, you have found the quickest opportunity, which is to connect existing traffic with a relevant offer.

Next, map your articles to the three stages of the buying cycle, Discovery, Consideration and Decision, and note which stage has the fewest articles. Plan the next three publications to fill that gap and decide who will review the older articles every quarter. Finally, agree with sales and marketing on two or three shared indicators, such as leads from the blog and the share of those leads that become opportunities. If your team is still selecting the platform, the ICX Technology Selection toolkit offers an evaluation matrix to compare options with clear criteria.

How ICX helps

ICX helps companies plan, implement and operate HubSpot so that content, CRM and reporting work as one system. The team supports the definition of the content strategy, the set up of blog templates, calls to action, lists and lead scoring, and the dashboards that show what the content produces. You can learn more on the ICX HubSpot page and in the content marketing consulting service.

Frequently asked questions

Why host a corporate blog on HubSpot instead of a separate tool? Because the blog connects with the CRM, so reader activity can be tracked, scored and nurtured, and the company can follow a visitor from the first article to a sales opportunity.

Does a blog really help with SEO? Each publication adds a new page to your website with its own keywords and links, which increases the chances of appearing in search results. HubSpot also offers on-page SEO recommendations for each post.

How long does a blog take to produce results? It varies by industry and by the quality of the content. HubSpot's research on compounding posts shows that some articles keep gaining traffic after publication, so the value builds over time.

What is a call to action in a blog? It is a prompt, usually a button or banner, that invites the reader to take a next step, such as downloading a guide, and that captures their data so the company can nurture the contact.

Can the same blog content be shared on social networks? Yes. HubSpot allows you to connect the blog to social media accounts, so publications reach people on the channels where they already spend time.

A blog that is connected to your CRM turns content into measurable growth. Request a HubSpot diagnostic with an ICX consultant to see how your content can support your pipeline.