Consistent blogging is the inexpensive way businesses ramp up the traffic they drive to their websites. It’s through it that businesses are able to enhance their inbound marketing efforts and attract online visitors to their site.
Confirming this is a recent inbound marketing report which went on to show that about 80% of the all the companies you know rely on blogging to acquire new customers, with 82% of all businesses admitting that blogging is a crucial division of their online marketing strategy.
Otherwise referred to as content marketing, there’s no enough emphasis as to the benefits one is likely to realize by integrating blogging to their online marketing strategy.
If you haven’t started blogging already, here’s a rundown of all the benefits you’re likely to realize when you finally decide to take the dive:
Blogging as a Business Owner
As a business owner, if you’re NOT running a consistent blog on the side, then there’s a whole lot you’re missing in terms of traction and sales.
Simply put, blogging is all about compiling your thoughts, facts, and informed opinion relating to your line of business, industry or targeted audience. You simply invest some time in coming up with a really informative piece of content that you’ll be posting on your website for every visitor of your website to read.
The World Wide Web has played a crucial role in flipping over the way businesses approach advertising. Its influence stretches past publications and broadcast media, to the way consumers generally consume media.
Businesses all over are beginning to look into other information gathering avenues, and consequently, juggling around with their inbound marketing strategies for better results.
They are practicing a strategy where consumers flock to them for information, instead of hard selling themselves to them.
Suffice it to say, blogging has on a large scale revolutionized the way people conduct their businesses and the benefits that come with it are all lined up below for all to see:
But first, here are some important stats that give you an insight of what to expect from blogging:
– Businesses that run a blog on the side are likely to drive 8 times more traffic compared to their counterpart who don’t.
– With blogging, you can reduce your overall marketing expenditure by a good 60%.
– With blogging, you’re likely to drive 3 times more leads.
Blogging to show your expertise and build trust
Clients want to view you as a real professional with enough technical expertise in your line of work. Speaking of which, it’s through blogging that you’re able to share what you know from the angle of a person with enough experience.
As a successful company, it’s your job to publish valuable blog articles that establish you as an industry leader and recognizable authority in your area of specialty.
This is important as it sets ground for your consumers to establish their trust and confidence in you and your brand. When a user reads your blog content, they naturally establish a connection with you as they trust you to teach them something new. This in turn clears any doubt they might have had regarding your product or brand.
Increase the Value of Customer Experience
The impression you give when you consistently blog instead of hard-selling yourself comes from the heart of good intentions. Customers want to know that you genuinely want to help them, and that you’re NOT only after what they have in their pocket.
As a business person, you blog because you want to create value and enhance the overall online experience of your prospects. Your goal is to create a better customer experience than what it’s being offered by your competitors.
So yes, there has to be a value factor in the type of content you post. You want your active followers or customers to have something of notable value they’ll be frequenting your blog for. This could a helpful checklist, how-to guide, outstanding ideas or recipes NOT found anywhere.
Blogging for SEO
Search Engine Optimization does a lot more than getting you ranked. The core being it keeps your business visible on search engines.
One approach you can take is to start writing a series of articles based on the search terms people use to find your products and services. It’s however even more important that you stick to only posting relevant content.
What happens is that search engines have web spiders that go around crawling online content for popular keywords. When they finally land on your site, and find out that you have optimized the right keywords, they’ll reward you by simply ranking you higher.
Collect Emails
You can use blogging to collect emails from your online visitors and start targeting them through email marketing.
Don’t be too shy to ask people to subscribe to your mailing list. The users will be automatically added to your marketing funnel, and you can start sending them promotional messages and relevant content to keep them updated.
The more you get to connect with your customers on a personal level via email the greater the odds of converting them.
Generate Demand
Demand generation is the first thing people do to generate leads and capture the interest of potential clients and customers. What happens is that businesses have to generate enough demand for their products in order to sell.
Content presentation and blog articles is one way business announce their products and services or inform their clients about their brand and the services they provide.
Demand generation helps to establish interest in the products you sell. This can go a long way to creating scores of loyal and returning clients, with some doubling as your brand ambassadors.
Blogging for Lead Conversion
The process involved in converting a prospect into a lead can be broadly classified into three stages, namely:
– Product Awareness Stage
– Product Consideration Stage
– Product Decision Stage
The benefits associated with blogging cuts across all the stages mentioned, with each one of them playing an equal role in converting a prospect into an active customer.
Take checklists for instance. With this you can easily get a prospective client interested in checking a product out. This is like the initial stage of conversion, where you just make your target audience aware of what it is you’re offering.
Next is how-to tips, which allows you to provide more info and relevant content that automatically sends a prospect into the consideration stage. The client might require a little nudge though, with more info regarding the product you’re selling for them to make up their mind.
Lastly in the testimonial stage of conversion; this helps to supply your readers with enough social proof to get them to make up their mind on whether they can go ahead and make a purchase.
Blogging for Exposure and Visibility
As a business owner, there’ll come a time when you’ll be tempted to spend the bulk of your business money in the operation and management of your business at the expense of promoting and advertising your brand.
Blogging comes as a solution for this, considering it can be done at absolutely zero cost on your part provided you know how to create valuable content.
Visitors will flock to your site after finding it on the search pages, and in the process, get to learn more about your brand and the product and services you provide.
A good example of a company spending so little on promotion yet they still manage to clock large volume of sales is Tesla. By focusing on consistent blogging, the company is able to rank higher on a broad range of search terms. In the process, they end up driving scores of prospects through SEO to create the much needed awareness and conversion.
Blogging for Influence Marketing
Blogging puts you in a favorable position to work with influencers in marketing your products. A simple approach would be to hand in your product to one of the influencers you know for an honest review. The influencer you choose must be generally liked by customers for their effort to have an impact.
It takes time to build a successful blog with an impressive amount of traction. Instead of waiting for your blog to grow, why NOT get an already established figure in the industry you’re in and ask them to review your product instead?
Their hundreds of followers they have can help you a great deal to reach a good number of your target audience and eventually secure you even more sales.
Blogging to Generate Backlinks
It’s easy to exchange backlinks with influencers and fellow business owners in Singapore if you have a blog. Through blogging, you can create value by dishing out valuable tips and useful information about your business or the industry at large, all with the sole aim of solving customer problems or to guide them through a process.
One good thing about backlinks, especially those coming from a reputable site, is that Google interprets them as a recommendation. And needless to say, the more recommendations you get, the more you establish yourself as an authority figure, besides fetching a higher ranking in the SERPs.
The New York Times strikes out as one of the companies that have heavily leveraged the power of backlinks to establish themselves as a formidable force. The company runs a successful blog where they have been consistently posting their opinions on a wide array of topics including technology and healthcare.
People have an easy time relating to such kind of topics and other brands can’t help linking back to the site whenever they find themselves blogging on something similar.
Blogging for Feedback
Blogging comes with a commenting section, where your readers can offer their two cents regarding your brand and the blog posts you make.
The blog section of your website serves as an extension of your brand. This is the place where you communicate directly with your prospects and get to work on winning their trust.
Customers are allowed to share their stories about your products and services. They can leave a feedback and even expound on your piece of content.
Blogging works on an almost similar vein as social listening. The feedback you get should therefore help you calibrate your marketing strategy for even better results in the future.
Trip Advisors is a brand to watch for a model to emulate. The company focuses on mentioning various holiday spots all over the world. With every blog post made, the company asks users to drop their opinions, feedback, and offer their suggestion on the destinations they have visited.
The feedback given offer an insight on how the company can best improve. It also helps to set ground for customer engagement.
Blogging to Stay Ahead of the Curve
A few of the visitors you attract to your blog will eventually decide to purchase one of your products or services. Provided you focus on making your blog content interesting enough, a good chunk of the readers you attract may be encouraged to go through with a purchase.
What you need is a steady blog that creates value, and indirectly helps users decide on which one of your products they should buy.
This helps you to cut through the market share enjoyed by your competitors.
A classic example of a brand leveraging blogging to beat their competition is the American Express. While their competitors were busy self-promoting themselves, the American Express saw value in sharing valuable blog posts with small businesses.
The tactic has been successful this far. They simply refrained from posting promotional content, and in the process gained a competitive edge that would mark the basis of their online success.
But that’s NOT where it all ends
With blogging, you’re guaranteed of registering an upsurge in the sales you make. It all starts with your readers building their trust in your brand and capabilities. This makes it a cinch to work on conversion, thus raising the number of sales you make.
It’s a Wrap
Not all blogging tactics are the same. The approach you take while creating your business blog will significantly vary depending on the industry you’re in and the kind of audience you’re targeting.
As a digital marketing agency with years of experience working with all sorts of clients, MediaOne is the agency to drop a line to for a free SEO consultation if you’re still NOT decided on the best approach to take.
