Reasons your company needs a blog!
Blogging is one of the most valuable tools that businesses have to engage with customers and help build on their online marketing goals.
Blogging, especially when combined with social media, is a common and powerful way to promote your business online, but there are still many small businesses that are hesitant to make the jump and start a business blog.
Well today, we’ve come up with some good reasons as to why your marketing strategy should include creating a vibrant blog. Here’s their list with some of our thoughts:
1. It Helps Drive traffic to your website— All your blog content can be crawled by Google and help you improve your positioning on organic search. Every blog you write and post is a new page indexed on your website which gives you more opportunity to be seen on search engines.
Blogging also helps you get discovered on social media, creating content that can be shared on social networks exposing your business to more and more people
So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.
The lead cycle in online marketing. (Image Courtesy of Hubspot.com)
2. Helps Convert Traffic into leads —
The way this works is really simple: Just add a call-to-action to every blog post. (At the very bottom you’ll find ours, give it a quick click will you 🙂 )
To be clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:
- Visitor comes to website
- Visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer
- Visitor clicks call-to-action and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
- Visitor fills out form, submits information, and receives the free offer
That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads.
The lead cycle, How to convert your blog visitors into leads. (Image Courtesy of Hubspot.com)
3. Brand Building — If you write well and are strategic in using social media channels, you can get your brand in many more people’s heads.
Your blog posts can demonstrate your expertise in a particular subject area by sharing high-quality and relevant information with your readers. Over time, you can become known as a go-to resource that provides consistent and useful information to help your readers learn about new tools and resources, solve tough challenges and advance their own businesses.
4. Competitive differentiation — It is likely that your direct competitors do not have a blog yet, so you can separate yourself from them by doing it now and building readership.
A blog also brings about better customer service, a unique voice and personality, expertise, credibility, better search rankings—all of these give you a competitive advantage. They all help differentiate you from your competitors.
5. Reputation Management — Business blogs are a proactive way for businesses to manage their reputation and speak directly to prospects, customers, partners, and the media.
Have information that presents well for your business rather than look like an abandoned business that quit operations in the 90’s.
6. Boost your credibility — Your blog posts will speak to your commitment to learn and stay on top of industry developments. And it will demonstrate that you do share resources, tips and other information that benefits and helps others. Making your business look credible and in full swing.
7. Provide Better Customer Service — Today, customers crave dialogue with companies. One-sided communication is a turn-off. A blog creates a two-way conversation. It encourages customers to interact with you and provide feedback, and it gives you another avenue where you can respond to their comments.
8. Blogs are cost effective — In terms of an investment, blogging is one of the best ones you can make. Each published post requires minimal time and provides long-term benefits to your business by promoting your brand, expertise and products or services. Some leads come from blog posts that were published months and sometimes years ago.
And you know what they say, “Balancing your money is the key to having enough.”
9. PR/Media — Blogs also become great outlets through with marketers can communicate other PR-type important information — things like product releases or event information.
10. Build a better business — You can lower your expenses, while increasing the number and quality of leads. You can test new ideas or products and get feedback directly from customers. You can keep your knowledge and sales skills sharp. Ultimately, a blog can help your company find the best ways to improve and grow.
Know of other reasons to start a company blog? What benefits has your business seen after you started blogging? Share your experiences in the comments section below!
Don’t have to write? Read more on our audience engagement solutions
