One of the most effective ways to build brand awareness, while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience is through consistent blogging.
Businesses operate in an ever-evolving landscape of technology and customer demands, which is why it is becoming increasingly important for small businesses to develop a strong web presence to engage and communicate with their customers. While having a highly optimised website is an essential element in your online marketing and branding strategy, a website alone doesn’t always offer enough information, personality, or authority to truly stand out from the crowd. This where a blog comes in…
A business blog is a valuable marketing tactic that will help increase the visibility of your business online and ultimately support its overall growth. It is also relatively inexpensive compared to other tactics and is proven to be an effective means for small businesses and start-ups to drive traffic to their site, enhance inbound marketing efforts, and attract more prospective customers.
If you are in need of further persuasion, here are five powerful reasons why your company needs a blog:
1. Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engines love original and relevant content and blogging is one of the most straightforward methods for a business to create this. Producing regular blog posts provides Google and other search engines with fresh content to index and by weaving in the relevant keywords which your customers will use to search for the types of services or products that your business offers, your content will be boosted further up the rankings. In search, more visibility means more click-through, which means gaining new customers.
2. Connect with customers
Engaging with your customers is a key element of online marketing and branding, and blogging provides the opportunity for you to connect with your existing and potential customers in a more conversational way and maintain regular contact. Because the route to publishing a post on your blog is relatively quick you can push out content in a timely manner – getting your ‘of the moment’ news and opinions out to your audience at the best moment possible. The best blogs have two primary functions – they help to answer the question that led the reader to that page, and they convince that reader that you are the right company to provide the required product or service.
Pushing out high quality, relevant content helps build trust with your target audience and opens up a dialogue. You might want to build a comment section into your website which will enable you to follow visitors’ responses to your posts and respond directly, which is huge in building relationships.
To help make these relationships profitable you should consider adding a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post. These calls-to-actions could lead to a complimentary content asset which the reader would be willing to exchange their information for, such as e-books, whitepapers, or fact sheets. This will help you create a group of warm leads who you can continue to build relationships with and aim to convert to customers.
3. Establish your expertise
Blogging is a great way for your business to build trust, not only with your current and prospective customers but with your wider industry as well. The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have and if you’re regularly producing content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. By providing content that will be viewed as valuable information, your potential customers get to see the knowledge and experience that you have gained in your field. Over time, writing regular advisory and informative blogs will make you the “go-to” tool within the industry in your particular niche, leading to more enquiries and higher conversion rates.
4. Show your company voice
Brand awareness is an incredibly important element of marketing and blog posting will allow you to portray a more “personal” side of your business. Blogs give you a chance to open up your brand message and reflect a clearer sense of the corporate standards, business character, vision, and the personality of your company, which can be more difficult to achieve via other marketing mechanisms.
5. Create opportunities for sharing
One of the most powerful benefits of blogging is the opportunity it creates for others to share the link to your blog – with so many different sharing platforms available, readers can share the direct link to the blog, tweet it, or email it to a friend. If you’re lucky and the blog successfully resonates with your audience there is the potential to generate a viral effect through social sharing and bookmarking and make a huge stamp in your market.
Summary
It’s good to remember that blogs work hard long after they’re published. The more Evergreen blogs you write i.e. search-optimised content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time, the more you are likely to benefit from their “compounding” effect as they generate increasing traffic long term. This certainly demonstrates the scalability of business blogging as while you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment.
If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy. If you don’t have the time or resources to write blog content you can outsource the posts to someone like me who can craft unique, relevant, and engaging content for your blog.