Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, it is far from it. Yes, there are multiple marketing tools and options available, but business blogging in 2018 should form a crucial part of your overall marketing strategy.
Let’s have a quick review of what is business blogging, the benefits of blogging for your business, and what a blog will do for your company.
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What is Business Blogging
Business blogging is an inbound content marketing strategy geared at drawing customers to you and your products. Essentially, it means that you write content to get noticed by the right potential clients and get them to come to you when they need your services or products.
So, instead of having to vie for your prospects attention, you are attracting them through your business created content.
What a Blog will do for your company
According to HubSpot, 90% of their blog leads come from old posts. What this means is that business blogging is a commitment for which you reap the rewards over time. So, blogging is creating building blocks for your business growth during the time that you actively work on your content marketing strategy.
Here are a few other ways that you can improve your business through blogging.
Related Post: 7 Powerful Ways to Use Business Blogging to Market Your Business
Build Brand Authority
Want to establish your business as a leader in your industry? Well, then blogging can help you do that.
When you blog consistently, it builds trust in readers and visitors. It also highlights you as a thought leader in your field. When you deliver value on a consistent basis, your audience will begin to look to you as an authority. And so, when they have questions, your site can become the first point of contact to get valuable information. This builds trust in your brand and eventually increases your sales.
Improve Your Site’s SEO
Search engines like fresh content. And so, a blog is the easy way to keep updating your site with new material. This helps to fuel the search engine optimization of your website. If you are working within a strategic content marketing plan, consistent blogging can improve your rankings in search engines.
Blog posts also allow you to improve the internal linking structure of your site – another crucial aspect of on-site SEO.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
When you use your blogs to focus on keywords that matter to your business, you can generate organic traffic to your website.
Blogging allows you to continuously update your site with new content. When you do this, and these pages are indexed by Google, it increases the chances of your business being found organically.
So, instead of having to pay for traffic, you can choose to focus on the keywords that your clients tend to search for. And you use your blog posts to show how you can help them with their problems.
Connect With Your Current and Potential Customers
Your blog gives you the opportunity to add a more human touch to your business. It helps you to develop a relationship with your current and potential customers. This could be in terms of a less formal tone in writing to engage your customers. Or to improve the face of your brand.
Benefits of Blogging for Business
Business blogging provides tangible benefits when you follow a content marketing strategy that has your blog as a critical element.
Cost-Effective Optimization Strategy
When you have a solid blogging strategy in place, you can reduce the reliance on paid traffic for specific keywords associated with your business and industry. With that, you can channel those marketing funds into other avenues of growing leads for your business. And when you have a good plan in place and quality blog posts, you appeal to and attract the right leads for your business.
Generate More Leads
With improved SEO from consistent blogging, you stand a higher chance of ranking for keywords related to your business. And when this happens, you generate more leads for your business.
HubSpot’s research consistently shows that businesses generate leads through blogging. In fact, their State of Inbound 2017 Report shows that blog content creation is 2nd in the list of inbound marketing priorities. 53% of respondents say that blog content creation is amongst their company’s top priority. This is second to growing their SEO/organic presence, of which “crafting more blog content that can be food via search” would be a crucial component.
Blogging is a Long-Term Investment
If you are looking for immediate results from your marketing, you may want to invest in direct advertising and pay-per-click campaigns such as:
- Google Adwords
- Social Media Ads on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn (depending on where your audience is)
- Email Marketing (but you would need to cultivate an email list first)
But, these will get expensive as time progresses unless you have the budget to support it. And even then, you should still be working to cultivate strong organic traffic.
And that’s why business blogging is very much alive and kicking. In fact, only a small number of marketers – 5% to be exact – consider blogging to be one of the most overrated marketing tactics. Paid print advertising leads the list of overrated tactics with paid online advertising coming in third.
Business blogging is not blogging for having a blog sake. It is a concentrated strategy that forms a part of your overall marketing efforts for your business. Blogging is, therefore, a long-term commitment that reaps real results. And the longer you blog, the more the rewards will grow.
It also means delivering real value to your target customers. And building a relationship of trust.
Moving Forward with Your Business Blog in 2018
So, we’ve established that blogging is effective for:
- Improving the SEO performance of your site
- Establishing your business credibility
- Building potential client relationships
- Generating leads
Implementing an inbound marketing strategy based on blogging is, therefore, a critical aspect of your marketing success for 2018. If you can’t find the resources in-house for a dedicated blogging strategy or you need a professional content strategist to work with, then consider outsourcing your blogging.
A content writer can help you develop a plan, research the topics, write the posts for you and even source images where necessary. Some also can upload to your website and schedule the publishing of your posts.
But, whatever you chose to do, find a quality content strategist that can help you use your blog to grow your business.
