One of the first pieces of advice businesses get when beginning digital marketing is to start a blog. However, blogging regularly takes a lot of time and effort, and without understanding why you should be blogging, you’ll end up using blogs ineffectively. No one wants to waste time creating blogs that don’t add value to your business, so it’s essential to understand how you can leverage blogs as a marketing tool.
In this blog, we’ll highlight how you can use blogs to achieve five critical benefits for your business. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to direct your blogs better to achieve these benefits and generate value for your business with every blog published.
5 Benefits of blogging for businesses
Blogging for businesses is very different from casual blogging.
When marketers use blogs, they see them as another channel to drive and nurture leads through the customer journey. To them, blogs fall into the same category as social media, email marketing, and press releases - they are all forms of content supporting business growth.
Let’s get into five specific benefits that blogging can help you achieve.
Blogging drives traffic to your website
Good blogs share insights and information for like-minded people to engage with. If the content is good enough, this will be shared amongst peers and other potential leads. This, in turn, drives people to your blog and thus your website.
Blogging also gives you a piece of content to share and promote through other channels like social media. If you present the blog in a good light and reach the right people, you’ll find they visit your blog and naturally progress to your website.
Finally, good blogs are great at answering questions. If you include the question in your blog’s title and throughout the copy, there’s a good chance the blog will be picked up by Google when someone is searching for the answer to that question. In this way, blogs drive traffic to your website with leads who are already interested in what you have to say and what you have to sell.
Blogging promotes your products and services
Blogs can also be used as a means of promoting your products and services, but don't mix this up with selling! Once you have an audience for your blog, you can begin to position your products and services as solutions to the questions your blog covers. Talk about challenges that your audience struggles with, and tell them how to solve those problems. The likelihood is that your services will be part of the solution.
You can also highlight and demonstrate specific tools and features of your solution, or reveal case studies of happy customers who use your services. Both of these approaches encourage other readers to become customers - just be sure to include a quick and easy way for readers to contact you or get to the pricing page with a good call to action.
Blogging builds trust with your customers
The education phase in the customer journey is essential to nurturing potential customers. Blogs are an excellent way to provide education to these leads. Topics of all sorts can be covered in-depth on your blog, and you can even address customer-specific questions that typically arise during the daily course of business.
By answering your customers' questions and providing valuable and interesting insights, you gradually build trust with your customers. Eventually, your customers will come to associate your business as the place they go to when they have a problem to solve or need a challenge overcome.
In his book "You ask, they answer", Marcus Sheridan talks about the Big 5 topics that people want to read about in blogs. These are:
- Cost and pricing
- Problems (theirs and yours)
- Comparisons and versus
- Best of lists (best in class, best practices)
- Reviews
With customers intrinsically trusting your brand, you encourage repeat business and a long-term relationship that constantly generates value.
Blogging helps your SEO
On a technical level, blogging can help your website rank higher on Google for phrases and topics your blog covers. As your blog is associated with your website, the fresh content, SEO keywords you use, and general topics all contribute to your overall website ranking.
The key to this specific benefit is to blog about topics related to your primary business offering. This will assist your SEO objectives across your entire website, with content from your blog supporting your website content and vice versa.
Blogging positions you as an expert
The most successful businesses are known for their expertise or the quality of their services or products. One of the best ways to build up a reputation like this is through sharing your knowledge and demonstrating your expertise.
Blogs are an excellent way to do this as they have a broad reach, give you the opportunity to lay out complex challenges, and enable you to position your product or service as the solution to these challenges.
Additionally, blogs give you the opportunity to demonstrate your competency with case studies while showcasing your awards, success, and qualifications. In many ways, having a blog is like having your own, personal, PR service.
Begin your blogging on the right note
Blogging has many benefits for your business, but they have to be created well with a clear vision for what each must achieve. While blog content relies upon customer and industry research, style and execution come down to expertise and experience. You may be new to blogging and want to catch up to competitors who have been doing it for longer. To compete on this level, you need a trusted partner who can guide you toward making the right moves.
If you want to be an organisation whose blog is a central asset, you need to start with an experienced partner that understands the sales and marketing process. We know that finding the right partner is a frustrating and time-consuming process, which is why we have spent the last 12 years designing, developing, and maintaining high-performing blogs for dozens of B2B clients worldwide.
Contact us and we will give you everything you need to build a high-performing blog - writing and design included. Start with taking our free blog audit and watch as your search rankings, traffic, and online leads increase.
