Is your business ready for the benefits of blogging?
Today’s consumers have more options than ever when it comes to where they spend their time and how they spend their money. Digital platforms offer buyers access to more services to solve their needs and provide more information to make better decisions.
It’s easier for customers to seek out value, but the ever-growing online competition can make it harder and harder for a business to gain exposure.
That’s why so many marketers are turning to blog strategies. With a business blog, you can supply the value that consumers deserve and elevate your brand above the rest. If you still haven’t added a blog to your content strategy, check out these significant ways it can build your business and deliver ongoing return on investment (ROI).
Improve Brand Awareness with SEO
Marketers often use the SEO benefits of blogging to direct their content.
A blog lets you employ search engine optimisation in new ways, with each post giving you keyword, linking, and indexing opportunities to boost your rankings. Users have more opportunities to find you, and when you get to the top of organic search pages, you earn their trust.
Frequent posts will boost your authority in the eyes of search engines and bring in more visitors. It’s so powerful that you can earn up to 55% more web traffic by running a blog.
Capture Leads at More Stages of the Buyer Journey
Keyword-rich blog posts are helpful, but there’s more to modern SEO than content structure. An essential part of the push for rankings involves user intent, the reason a user enters a search query. The more closely you can connect with that intent, the higher your ranking.
Considering the value of user intent, blogging can help you build awareness and interest in a couple of ways.
To start, you give search engines more reason to rank you higher when you offer an informative article. Without a blog, much of your web content will be brand and product-oriented. That limits the number of users who will come across your website because you only match a buying intent.
Users take to Google to find information, not necessarily to buy. When the rest of your website is focused on selling, your blog can focus on educating. You’ll start to offer better answers for user queries, and you’ll raise your brand awareness as your rankings improve.
Because your blog can focus on informing instead of outright selling, you can also capture leads at different stages of the sales funnel. Users at the early buying stages can now find your business sooner.
By adding loads of value in the initial stages, you can find your place on the user’s shortlist when it comes time to make a buying decision. You can use strategic call to actions (CTAs) within your blog to then push them through the funnel and keep them engaged with your brand.
Facilitate Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Blogging and social media go hand-in-hand, so much so that 97% of bloggers promote their posts through social platforms. That stunning statistic speaks to one of the most significant benefits of blogging for small business — it saves time on the rest of your digital marketing!
Coming up with fresh content is exhausting, and a blog can be a valuable lifeline when you need to keep up a schedule. If you need to get a Facebook post up, you can share a blog post to help you fill your daily quota.
Using social media is just one way to get more miles out of a blog post when you’re low on ideas. You can also repurpose your best pieces for your email lists and newsletters or expand on them for gated lead magnets like e-books.
Build Trust and Loyalty
Blogging can both attract new customers and mobilise them to grow your audience. As we mentioned, a first page ranking on a Google results page brings inherent trust. Users trust Google to return the best answers, so they’ll subsequently trust your content as more authoritative than the next webpage.
When users find value in your content, they’ll be more likely to share it with their friends. Users don’t have too many reasons to share a product page on Twitter or Facebook unless they really believe in it. But they may share a bunch of your daily blog posts if their friends find them interesting or entertaining.
Companies who blog earn 67% more leads on average each month than businesses that don’t blog. Customers enjoy learning about brands through custom content, and they’ll be more at ease providing their information when they get something of value.
When done with integrity, a blog supplies the honest value that users recognize and enjoy. The trust a blog creates will give you more organic and non-organic routes to customer data and more sales.
Shape Your Brand
As one part of your entire content marketing strategy, your blog is more than a result of your planning. Marketing is a cyclical process of creation, measuring, and re-strategising, and you can glean valuable insights from your blog to help propel your brand.
Marketers can use Google Analytics and a host of other online tools to measure engagement and uncover valuable information from their blog, such as:
- Topics for blogs that users are pursuing
- Which CTAs get the best response
- Where users are in the buyer journey
- Which posts are getting the best response, backlinks and social shares
There are countless data points that blogs offer to give you a better understanding of your customer. Over time, your blog will help you fine-tune your target audience, delivering more quantitative and qualitative insights that lead to more effective brand messaging.
Don’t forget that a blog is a great place to express your brand as well. You can use it to provide exclusive insights that make you more authoritative, or you may joke around to show your brand’s personable side. It’s where you create memorable user experiences that make you stand out amid all the noise.
Discover the Benefits of Blogging Today
The benefits of blogging are too long to list, but hopefully, this article gave you a taste of its potential. When you add a blog to your digital marketing strategy, you’ll discover one of the most cost-effective paths to growth.
A blog is one essential way to boost web traffic, but it’s only one slice of a very large pie.
