How a Blog Can Help Your Business
The world has become digital and everything we do, from buying movie tickets to listening to your favorite artist’s new album, has become digitized.
Remember the last time you needed a solution to a problem and you used Google? Let’s say you wanted an easy-to-use email marketing platform to grow your email list, you Googled and found a couple of links pointing to several blog posts. You read a post and was convinced on the email marketing solution to grow your subscriber list and boost your email marketing.
That is the power of blogging, it is the perfect platform for content marketing. Since, several other folks (including your potential customers) follow this routine whenever they need a solution to a problem or need to purchase a new product, having a blog becomes a necessity for your business.
The problem with having a blog for most business owners is that they do not have time, they lack the experience, and blogging can be daunting during the initial stages. Some business owners don’t just see the value.
Well, in this post, you will learn seven ways in which a blog can help your business. Let’s get down to it.
1. Build better relationships with your customers
To build a deeper relationship with someone, you need to be there for them all the time. Having a blog is one of the ways to be there for your customer, it is a platform to provide solutions to problems, answers to questions, guidance, and information. Customers who enjoy how you treat them will want to buy from you.
Businesses with functional blogs also consistently engage their customers; this way, they get to know their audience better; they understand exactly what their audience wants. This also helps businesses build a better buyer persona, and once a business knows who its ideal customer is, it becomes easy to build a relationship because you have a precise idea of how to please them.
2. Build a brand
There are several ways to tell your brand story, but blogging is by far the most effective. Why? Because a blog is a platform to engage your audience using different forms of content continually. You can show potential and current customers your voice, style, and tone through the text and graphics contents you upload on your blog. Also, through your blog, customers can get to know your philosophy, ideas, goals, and employees.
3. Establish your business as an industry leader
Every business wants to be viewed as an authority in their industry, irrespective of their size. Customers trust businesses that are viewed as an authority in their industry and patronize them more. Blogging consistently is an effective way for small businesses to become industry leaders even in a competitive industry. By providing in-depth solutions, guides, and advice to your readers, you establish yourself as an authority especially when other authorities (media, bigger blogs etc.) in your industry start noticing your blog posts. When this happens, you may start getting invites to bigger platforms – television, podcast, radio shows, and magazines in your industries; giving you more social proof.
4. Boost social media presence
A huge social media presence is important for both big and small businesses in today’s world. Facebook alone has over a billion daily users, including your ideal customers, to have a slice of this big pie, you need to blog because a well-written blog could go viral and receive thousands of shares on social media; thereby, boosting your social media audience.
Therefore, it is important you have social media buttons on your blog pages to make it easy for people to share your posts.
5. Boost your email marketing
With blogs, it is very easy to grow your email list. All you need do is create opt-in forms on your blog pages so visitors can easily add their email address to get updates from you.
Why is it important to grow your email list? It is because email marketing is the most effective form of marketing for boosting sales; it is direct and engages only those that are interested in what you do. Since your email list is filled with your ideal customers, it is also the perfect channel to survey your customers.
6. Generate traffic and leads
Consistent traffic and leads happen to be the biggest headache for most businesses according to HubSpot; however, without these two, sales are always mediocre.
Google and other search engines provide the most traffic (Google alone receives 100 billion monthly searches), to tap into this traffic, you need to practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One excellent SEO practice is blogging consistently and this is why companies that publish over 16 blog posts monthly get almost four times the traffic that companies that publish just four times in a month.
7. Cheap and effective advertisement
Through content marketing, SEO, and email marketing, blogging offers you a cheap but effective form of advertisement. This is perfect for small businesses with a tight advertisement budget. Organic search traffic and content marketing are free, they will only cost you time. Email marketing will not dig a hole into your advertisement budget.
However, they are more effective than traditional marketing as they are directed to your target audience.
Conclusion
Even with the obvious benefits blogging offers your business, you may still find it hard to blog consistently because some of the factors we mentioned earlier: time and lack of experience. However, it is not a must to blog every day especially when you are starting out. You can blog weekly or biweekly, then you can increase the number of blog posts you write once you have found your rhythm.
Another option is to outsource your blogging to a freelance blogger or digital agency that specializes in on page SEO and understands your industry. Wondering what to blog about? Write content that engages, informs, advises, and entertains your ideal customer.