Blogging is helping businesses in so many great ways. The discussion whether companies should blog or not is no longer valid. A business blog will help boost your search rank, drive greater traffic to your website, and bring in new customers. It’s truly an effective way to market your brand and reach out to your target audience.
What’s Business Blogging?
It’s when you use blogging to promote your brand and business. When blogging for business, the topics you cover in the blog posts should be around a particular subject matter related to the industry you work in.
A business blog differs from a personal; – it’s definitely not your hobby, and it’s also not your whole business, meaning that your blog isn’t the primary way you earn money. The blog is there to support your business, help you connect with your audience, and build and maintain meaningful relationships with your customers.
Here are some more reasons why your business needs a blog:
1. Blogging can boost your online presence
Blogging can boost your business’ online presence, but only if you provide value to your readership. Create useful content and help educate your audience about how your offers can solve their problems.
Try to see the world from your customers’ point of view, answer their questions, be relevant, original, and valuable. Once your readers know they can trust you, they’ll become regular supporters and long-term clients.
2. It’s an amazing platform to show who you are and what you do
Blogging gives you an opportunity to talk about your business, what you offer, build trust, and connect with prospective customers before, or as they make a decision about buying from your company.
You can create content that educates your audience about the products and services you offer, show them what they do, explain how they can help them, discuss timely news and market trends etc.
Your blog is an amazing platform that lets you communicate your ideas and have people react almost immediately to whatever you are sharing.
Blogging encourages interaction, discussion and feedback, and creates a two-way direct conversation with prospects, customers and industry peers.
3. A business blog gives personality to your brand
Your brand is who you are (in a professional sense), what your business represents, and what it stands for. People want to feel connected to a company before they make a purchase, and if everything else is even between you and your competition, they will choose the company they like better.
Blogs are amazing for showcasing the personal side of your company. All your employees (even if you’re just 2 or 3 people) can write useful and interesting blog posts, publish short and catchy messages, post photos of your team, office environment, work events and gatherings. A good, quality blog lets the personality of your brand shine and shows people what your business is all about.
4. Blogging lets you qucikly reach a much larger audience
Blogging for business fuels your SEO! Search engines love fresh and valuable content, and a quality website with an active blog is just the right recipe for a powerful online presence. On the blog you also have a chance to use your target keywords and help optimize your web content. Regularly updated websites encourage people to return more often, -this boosts your site traffic, and the more the visits to your pages, the greater search ranks and organic reach will be.
Instead of window shopping, people now use the Internet to look for products they need. Whoever holds the highest positions in the search results is getting all the business.
If people discover your blog content first, you have a chance to introduce them to your company and brand in a more personal, non-promotional way, and answer their concerns and questions before they’ve even asked them.
Once you earn your readers’ trust they’ll want to jump in and start to interact with you on a deeper level. And what’s more, when satisfied, they’d want to share their experience with people in their circles about the value that you and your business hold.
5. Blogs help establish authority in your professional area
By consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target audience, answering their common questions, sharing your expertise, and posting regularly about your industry, products and updates, you position your business as an authority in their eyes, a true wealth of information.
Blogs are a great way to build your online exposure, credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. So when customers need what you are selling, your company will be the first that comes to their mind to contact.
6. Blogging helps acquire leads and prospects, and convert them into customers
No one can argue with data. So here’s what the numbers say:
- 70% of consumers learn about a company through articles rather than ads;
- 52% of customers say blogs impact their buying decisions;
- 61% of U.S. buyers have made a purchase based on a blog post;
- 57% of online marketers say they’ve acquired new customers via their blogs.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing study, blog frequency also impacts customer acquisition. The more often you blog, the greater your chances of winning new customers. Check the graphic for details:
The way to convert more traffic into leads and customers is to add lead-generating calls-to-action to every blog post you publish. Ask people to subscribe to your email newsletters, promote digital downloads of free ebooks, fact sheets, free webinars, consultations and trials, … basically any content asset that would encourage them to exchange information with you.
Not everyone will convert into buyers, but by nurturing your relationships with prospects, analyzing your conversion data, and creating content around the topics of their interest, you’ll certainly get closer to this goal.
7. Quality blog content has long-term benefits.
If you’ve published a new post on the company blog today, it’ll probably bring in some visits and leads for your business in the following couple of days, from your email and RSS subscribers, people who regularly read your blog and follow you on social media.
But this is not the end of it. Now the content appears in search engines’ results, which means the blog post will continue to drive you traffic and leads for days, weeks, months, even years after putting it out. Your business strategy is stable when larger part of your traffic comes from previously published content.
Blogging is an essential part of a successful online marketing strategy. These are just few of the reasons why, and certainly the core benefits of a business blog.
What’s your experience? Do you blog on your business website? Please let us know in the comments!
