Over the last ten years or so, blogging has gone from being something that it’s nice for businesses to do to becoming a default part of any marketing campaign. It has a huge number of advantages, and we’re going to take a look at eight of them today.
You’ll want to make sure that you read this article in full before you dive in and get started, because you’ll need to have developed your digital marketing strategy before you start blogging. Creating content takes time and money, and if you don’t have a strategy to help guide you, it’s an easy way to waste money.
But done well, blogging can provide a huge amount of value for a business, as this article is going to show you. And so with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at why blogging is important for business.
Why blogging is important for business
1. It opens up a communications channel
Perhaps the most important aspect of running a blog is that it opens up a communications channel for your business. It provides you with a place that you can use to respond to current events, criticism and any concerns that people have about your company. You can invite people to leave comments and respond to those, or you can simply use it to comment on anything that you know is important to your readers.
2. It boosts SEO
One of the main things we talk about when answering the question of “how might a business use a blog?” is that they can use it to boost their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns. That’s because it provides your site with fresh content, something that Google and other search engines always prioritise. As if that wasn’t enough, it also provides you with more opportunities to receive inbound links and allows you to target additional keywords that you might not be able to rank for on your main site. If your not convinced here are some more reason on why SEO is important for your business.
3. It provides you with social media content
If you’re managing social media profiles on behalf of your business, the chances are that you’ve occasionally struggled to find things to post about. One of the positives of running a company blog is that it ensures that you always have something to talk about, even if you’re just sharing your most recent post. You can also use social media to crowdsource comments from your network. For example, if you run a site that sells trading cards, you could ask your audience which are the most treasured cards in their collections.
4. People expect it
Blogging in 2022 is like social networking in 2015. People expect companies to be doing it, and yet not everyone has climbed onboard. This provides you with an opportunity to develop a competitive advantage by being the leading content creator in your industry. Done well, blogging will ensure that you’re the company that people turn to when they have questions, and you’ll naturally be able to turn these people into customers through the smart use of calls-to-action. If you’re a B2B industry, you’ll be able to take those leads and to turn them into prospects through data capture forms and CRM systems.
5. It pushes people through the sales funnel
The sales funnel is a concept that marketers use to refer to the different steps that people follow along their journey to become a customer, starting with awareness and moving on until they become active customers and, eventually, brand advocates. By creating content with a blog, you can cater to different people at different steps throughout the sales funnel and you can encourage them to go from one step to the next. Eventually, you’ll have a back catalogue of evergreen (that is, always relevant) content that caters to every stage of the sales funnel.
6. It’s cost-effective content marketing
Content marketing can quickly become expensive. This is especially true if you’re creating visual content like infographics, and it gets even more expensive for video content. Even long-form written content like ebooks and white papers can be pricey, especially if you’re carrying out original research or paying for someone to put them into layout. Blogging is one of the cheapest and most cost-effective forms of content marketing out there, and 70% of people would rather get information from blogs than from traditional advertisements.
7. It differentiates you from the competition
Building on from what we talked about earlier, blogging allows you to naturally establish a point of difference between you and the competition. Done well, blogging will allow you to specifically highlight what makes your company different, from the tone of voice that you use to the topics that you choose to write about. You can even look at what your competitors are writing out so that you can target the same keywords but with a different message.
8. It provides long-term results
Some marketing strategies focus on short-term results. For example, pay-per-click advertisements start driving traffic and sales almost as soon as you set them up and start running them, but they’ll only have that effect for as long as they’re running. As soon as you hit the pause button, they’ll stop. Blogging is different because although it can take a while to start seeing a return on investment (ROI), once your blog is successful, it will deliver ongoing results over time.
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What’s Next?
Now that you’ve got a good idea of the benefits of blogging for companies, it’s over to you to make sure that you’re putting blogging to work for your company. Like any type of marketing, though, it’s important to make sure that you have a strategy. If you just blindly dive into blogging, you’re not going to get the results that you might otherwise hope for.
The good news if that you’re looking for help with your marketing strategy, we’ve got you covered. And if you need blog content writers, we got you there too. We specialise in helping people just like you to find the perfect agency, so reach out to us today to find out more or follow us on your favourite social networking sites for more. We’ll see you soon for another article!