If you own a startup or working as a CMO in an enterprise and want your business to outshine competitors, you should own a business blog. Holding a business blog would let you connect with your existing customers and help to create a pool of potential customers.
In addition, business blogging can grow your online presence, strengthen your brand loyalty, contribute values to your industry, and innumerable other advantages, which we would discuss in the latter part of this blog.
Business Blogs and Success Mantra
Making a dent in the blogging space with your business blog is quite challenging. There are over 600 million active blogs today out of over 1.87 billion websites. According to GrowthBadger, the number of blog posts being published every year is around 2.5 billion, which stands for 4,800 blog posts are being published every minute.
Considering the enormous competition in the blogging space, you might ask yourself whether it worth it, especially when you can reach out to target customers through marketing emails and social media posts. The answer is yes, of course.
This blog will discuss how planning a business blog could be productive for your marketing strategy, alongside addressing all the questions appearing on your mind.
Why Should You Own a Business Blog?
The world has put on a digital makeover, and your business should have an online presence to connect with existing and potential customers. Having a website would be the best way to communicate with all these people. And for reaching out, you should have a presence on the search engines such as Google through a business blog incorporated into the site.
Read more: 9 top steps to launch a successful business blog
A blog for business could drive the following things for you without spending a fortune on a marketing budget.
1. Builds Trust with Customers
Unlike news about current industry affairs, blog content often offers a longer shelf life to help its customers in every step of their shopping journey. Most of the buyers start their journey through a query about the product. And if your business blog addresses the topic with relevance, it builds a positive impression on the buyer’s mind.
And if your content continues to offer relevant information on time, your business doesn’t only generate new leads but matures as a brand authority.
That way, your business blog would achieve better search engine ranking alongside building a trust factor on your existing and potential customers.
2. Drives Long Term Results
There are myriad ways to grab the attention of potential customers. Techniques like targeted advertisements, throwing contests on social media platforms, and hiring influencers create new funnels pouring in new business for you. But these marketing strategies often involve tons of money. Suppose your business can afford a lean budget on marketing. In that case, you can solely bank on publishing quality content with the brand authority and spread them via emails and official social handles and expect a decent outcome.
Pushing blogs via marketing emails and social channels increase your customer engagement, and more people tend to follow your social handles in the future. In addition, constant attention will increase your search engine ranking and help your future blogs achieving organic traffic.
3. Establish Brand Authority
The ball starts rolling on the internet soon after your blog starts pulling traffic. The more traffic you get, the more viewers see your content from all over the world. And for driving tens and hundreds of people to your site and build authority, your content requires you to rank higher on the search engines. The ranking process is quite complex and requires a unique content plan, apt marketing tools, and publishing blogs on time to display your authority over the niche. But once you achieve it, people will soon recognize you as a brand authority.
For instance, if you’re looking for cybersecurity mitigation tips, you’ll always head to McAfee, Kaspersky, Norton, and so on instead of visiting typical tech blog sites referring to the same content. The primary reason behind it is that all these cybersecurity enterprises have established themselves as brand authorities.
Your business blog could also achieve a similar result if you offer better topical relevance than your competitors. Because search engines like Google automatically rank the pages higher with the best topical relevance. And that would result in some serious business growth for you.
Business Blogging: Essential Facts You Should Know
- Blogging ranks third on the most relevant content marketing strategy tools and stands right after video and eBooks. Interestingly you can convert all your blog content into informative videos and eBooks. In those ways, content blogs are the most powerful marketing tool you could develop. (HubSpot)
- Businesses who actively blog with timely content record 55% more visitors than the competitors who are yet to start with it. They also receive 434% higher indexed pages and 97% higher indexed links than the businesses that don’t have a blog. (DemandMetric)
- Another study in 2019 claims marketers trust the power of blogging experiences 13 times higher ROI than the businesses who don’t own a blog yet. (HubSpot)
- Over 70% of online readers trust articles to learn about a particular product or an organization. And over 82% of the consumers grow a positive perspective about a company after reading its blog contents. (DemandMetric)
- Blogs with knowledgeable and well-timed content obtain 67% more leads than the competitors who are yet to unveil a blog. (HubSpot)
- Over 91% of B2B and 86% B2C marketers trust content marketing, while 78% of the CMO foresee custom content as the future of marketing. (HubSpot)
4. Develop And strengthen the New and Existing Relationship with Customers
A business blog is perhaps the best connecting cord for enterprises to attach directly with their customers. Offering the exact content customers look for at the right time can immensely increase their trust in the brand with time. For instance, a first-time buyer looking for a razor could stumble upon a blog explaining all types of razors the company is offering. The blog can come in handy if it elaborately explains its razor features to help customers pick the right one. Unlike promotional campaigns, a business blog hardly requires a big budget, but it can increase your businesses online visibility for an extended period.
Your business blogs can also share periodical insights explaining the paradigm shift of the future business, thus helping your customers discover new horizons in their business.
Such content can also establish a trust factor among your customers, strengthen the relationship with its customers and push them to spread good words about your brand.
5. Bring New Customers
Adding new blog content adds a new page to your site. This continuous process comes in handy for SEO purposes because it compels the search engines such as Google to re-crawl your site to index the latest content. Such endless scrolling increases website ranking and takes your place higher on the search engine results. And thus, your site could achieve a stream of traffic and gain visibility to your brand.
Following the right strategy for your blog content, such as SEO-friendly titles, meta descriptions, keywords, and images, could boost your website traffic. Obtaining more traffic also indicates new readers to your site, who can turn into potential customers in the future.
6. Help To Convert Leads into Business
Generating more traffic to your site and gaining traction on social media networks is like half the battle won. However, many of your readers might be interested only in reading the content and leave soon after they are done with it. So you should also have some appropriate strategy to convert your leads into potential customers.
Irrespective of the content quality, each blog should deliver a solid call to action. Otherwise, it could turn into an opportunity wasted. It would be best to involve your readers in doing something once they visit the blog, such as subscribing, clicking, reading further, and downloading.
You can also offer them a white paper or a course in exchange for their professional whereabouts. That could lead you to create a database of potential customers and a target for sending your marketing emails. You can also add a hello ribbon on the blog with attractive offers to impress the readers.
You can adopt many other strategies to convert your leads into business via publishing authority business blogs.
7. Help You Generate Excellent Marketing Content
Having a business blog with the right content help you immensely to generate email leads. For example, you can convert your existing blog content into a white paper explaining a particular topic and share it with current and potential customers. You can also repurpose your blog content into a podcast, video, social media cards, impressive infographics, or a presentation. Thus you can generate more timely content and garner a wide variety of readers.
8. Gain Backlinks
Maintaining a content strategy to publish timely and relevant content with a unique reading experience with appropriate information and educational values would lead you as the brand authority. Such authority articles often get referred by blogs and news articles via backlinks. And whenever other sites refer to your blogs by putting up a link back to your content. Google crawl these links to understand the command of a blog on any particular topic. Such digital recommendations help to strengthen your website authority to the search engine algorithms.
9. Build Up Your Social Presence
Publishing great content also creates an immense opportunity to strengthen your social presence by sharing it over social media platforms. For example, if the articles offer unique insights or knowledge, people on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit share the content with fellow users. This game of sharing and resharing creates a better reach out to new readers and increase your visibility on the internet. This strategy comes particularly handy for small businesses and startups to gain credibility and build relationships with potential customers.
10. Boost Demand for Your Products
A well-written business blog could be a great tool to generate demand for your product. Many enterprises use their business blogs to unveil new products, updates, features and explain how their products are ahead in the game. These posts could obtain attention from the existing customers and convert potential buyers into effective leads. Several hardware and software enterprises follow this model to generate brand loyalty among their existing customer base.
11. Interact With the Customers
Business blogs also work as an effective interaction tool with the customers. Customers having thoughts, concerns or demands often post on the business blogs to get the authorities to hear from them. They can also share their feedback directly on the blog posts. Such feedback also creates a direct channel for the businesses to interact directly with their customers and come in handy while adding or updating features on a new product or product update.
12. Stay Ahead in The Game
Having a business blog updated frequently with actionable and timely content could place you one step ahead f your competitors. Studies claim that businesses with consistent and exciting blogs encourage their readers to buy more products because the continuous flow of content places them as subject experts and builds trust. A good business blog can also offer value to its customers by helping them to pick the right product and services for themselves.
According to content marketing research, businesses with a blog full of helpful and authentic content outperform competitors with no blog by 67%. The statistics speak for the necessity of a good business blog. It helps you extend your business by compounding your customers and the volume of sales.
For instance, you can see banking blogs writing posts explaining how taking a car loan could be beneficial to save additional taxes. When a first-time car buyer looks for such information can get easily impressed by such blogs. Besides offering enough information about further tax saving, the banks deliberately push a call to action by explaining the type of car loans they offer. And happily, such strategies work surprisingly well because the reader learns the necessary car loan saving tax benefits and often clicks on the call-to-action button to offer a lead for the bank.
Final Words
A blog is a compilation of facts, thoughts, and expert opinions intertwined with an appropriate call to action. Most business blogs offer pertinent knowledge about a particular product or industry and help readers learn more about it. Since a business blog often associates with the corporate website, most readers visit it before or after their reading session.
Appropriate and knowledgeable blog content often introduces a product to first-time readers and comes in handy to interlink it with your offerings. Large enterprises and startups often develop a cluster of articles to compel the reader to spend more screen time on the website and navigate the solutions a business offers. Contemporary business blogs also publish educational guides like FAQs, step-by-step guides, how-to, and listicles to establish the brand image to the reader’s eyes.
A business blog offers myriad benefits to a business. It can effectively boost your sales volume and encourage better customer engagement and build a strong community for you.
Suppose your organization is still wondering to launch a blog; it’s high time to have one. It can boost your online presence in no time and can offer immense help to your marketing team.