Why your business blog should not be an afterthought

Whether you’ve already set up your business blog or not, you might be wondering if it’s worth having at all. With an estimated 600 million blogs already on the internet, you may think you’re shouting into a worldwide black hole. However, companies that invest time and effort in their business blogs find they bring plenty of benefits.

If you’re an SME struggling to reach your audience or a corporate business that wants to become a thought leader in its sector, company blogs can support your brand, sales, marketing and even internal objectives in a variety of ways. Plus, compared to other strategies, blogs are relatively low cost and time-effective to run.

So, what exactly are the benefits of investing in your business blog and how can you do so effectively?

Get your brand seen

Getting your website as high as possible in the Google rankings, improving reach on social media and increasing website traffic are key objectives for many businesses. These metrics indicate how visible your brand is to your target audience and can all be improved considerably with regular, high-quality blog content.

By optimising your content for SEO, attracting backlinks from other sites and focusing on quality rather than quantity, blogs are proven to help improve search rankings and website traffic. Surveys have shown businesses that blog regularly get twice as much traffic as their non-blogging competitors. This may be due to the fact that, as BrightEdge found, 68% of website traffic came from organic or paid search on average.

Engaging with other businesses, influencers and thought leaders through research or guest blogs is another way blog content can help to increase your brand reach. Similarly, producing blogs gives you useful, informative and engaging content to share through paid or organic social media. In this way, blogs can help you to interact with your target audience in new ways.

Engage your customers

By combining SEO research with your expertise, you can create quality content that is useful, helpful or interesting to your customers. This makes blog content particularly useful for capturing new prospects at the top of the sales funnel. Indeed 90% of consumers find personalised content useful and 78% believe companies that create content want to build genuine relationships with them.

In short, blogs don’t just help customers find the information or advice they need but make them feel a stronger connection to the brands they buy from. In the eyes of consumers, businesses that create quality content are authentic, authoritative, passionate and trustworthy.

Inspire your team

Blogs don’t just benefit your customers, but your team too. Whether you use your content to share the knowledge of internal experts, tell employee stories or celebrate their successes, it can help to drive greater recognition and engagement amongst your team.

Encouraging employees to write for your blog can also help to inspire their work and enhance their knowledge. Researching, developing and editing content so it’s suitable for an external audience is a skill in itself and can help employees get to grips with specific topics or industry trends.

It can also help employees to do their jobs more efficiently, particularly those in customer service teams. Creating content based on the most frequently asked customer queries, you can answer prospects’ questions with a simple Google search.

This doesn’t just speed up the sales funnel and free up customer service phone lines, but shows prospects that your brand understands their needs – a standard that’s expected by 66% of customers.

Build your brand

As well as meeting your customers’ needs, sharing important business news and the story of your brand, blogs give you the space to develop and share your knowledge, information and expertise. Written under editorial guidelines set by your business, your blog should be the voice of your brand and establish your authority in relevant topic areas or trends.

For example, even without seeing any logos or images, you’d be able to differentiate Innocent Drinks’ blog articles from those of Coca-Cola thanks to the topics they cover, the expertise they show and the brand tone the content’s written in. In this way, blog content is a unique opportunity to break through the noise of the internet, reach your target audience and set yourself apart from your competitors.

Drive conversions

Unlike adverts, phone calls or in-store service experiences, blogs aren’t just a single touchpoint that customers will come across once, but part of a long-term conversation they’ll have with your brand. The Content Marketing Institute found that 74% of top-performing businesses are able to nurture their subscribers, audiences or leads through their content marketing, of which a blog plays a key part.

As well as driving prospects to the site, blog content can reassure them of your brand’s trustworthiness, authority and even the quality of your products or services. Indeed, 56% of consumers were found to have made a direct purchase as a result of a blog, which shows the power that quality content has in driving leads down the conversion journey.

Ready to get blogging?

To make sure your blog returns on your investment, it’s not enough to publish ad-hoc content whenever you get round to it. Having a data-informed content strategy in place will ensure you’re developing blogs that meet the needs of your customers, make the most of your internal resources and truly benefit your brand and business.

If you’re struggling to find the time to write, edit and post on your blog, then partnering with an experienced agency can help you benefit from quality content, without having to reallocate your resources.

Having developed effective content strategies for client brands across a range of industries, we can help you create a blog that will meet your sales, marketing or brand objectives.

You can read more about how our team work closely with you to form an effective content marketing strategy by clicking here

For an initial informal consultative chat, call us on 01926 754038 or alternatively, drop us an email at hello@designmc.org with your details and one of our team will be in touch – and we can start the journey towards building a better blog for your business!