8 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Blog
November 25, 2016
“How can a blog help my business?”
As a business owner, or someone working for one, you may have asked yourself this question.
You may see your competitors blogging or someone may have recommended it to you in a conversation.
However, without an explanation, it’s hard to see why you should start blogging for your business or how it could possibly benefit your business.
Does a blog benefit your business?
Absolutely!
Answering how it benefits your business is a little more involved.
Blogging provides several benefits to your business. For this post, we’ll start with 8 big ways your business benefits from blogging.
1. A blog increases your brand’s visibility in the search engines.
You’ve likely heard the term “SEO” thrown around a lot.
At its most basic definition, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting traffic from search engines, more specifically on the organic side (non-paid).
Successful, effective SEO involves a lot of different tactics and strategies, so it ends up covering a wide range of “stuff,” but everything involved in SEO has one goal – increasing visibility in the search engines.
Publishing blog posts regularly on your site is one tactic to increase your web presence.
Search engines love websites that are regularly updated with fresh, relevant content.
It signals to them that your website is growing and evolving with a real interest in providing relevant content to users.
In addition to benefitting your users, a regularly updated blog also helps your site by providing more relevant pages for the search bots to crawl and index.
The more relevant pages of content search engines can crawl and index for your website, the more relevant search queries you’ll be able to show up for in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
This isn’t the only thing that will help increase your web presence, but it helps.
Plus, it helps you earn more inbound links (a.k.a. backlinks) to your website, which gives your website more credibility.
According to HubSpot data, companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website than companies who do not blog.
2. A blog increases traffic to your website.
If you regularly publish blog posts that are relevant to your audience, you will see increased traffic to your website.
In a HubSpot study, data showed that companies publishing 16+ blog posts per month received almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that only published 0-4 monthly blog posts.
This isn’t to say that you should start publishing 4 or more blog posts a week right now. In this case, and with a lot of digital marketing efforts, quality wins over quantity every time.
If you’ve never blogged on your website or put much thought into it before, start off will only what you can handle while maintaining a high level of quality.
If that’s only once a month to start, it’s okay. You’ll still see increases in traffic from your efforts, which you can increase further by spending more time on promoting your post.
If you’ve never done much for your website before, you could start seeing traffic increase quickly; however, it usually takes consistent blogging over time to build an audience.
Over 2 million blog posts are published every day, and that number is creeping higher all the time. The content landscape is fierce and you have a lot of competition.
It’s going to take time for your content to break through the noise and really make an impact on your traffic, especially if you are not actively promoting it.
3. A blog helps you build authority.
Your website is the first step for your business towards building authority online. Blogging will help you take it the rest of the way.
On your blog, you’re able to share valuable information with your customers to help them solve problems.
Through informative blog posts you can answer their questions, provide the information they’re searching for, and, in the process, come to be viewed as an authority they can trust.
4. A blog builds relationships with customers.
When customers land on your site after searching online, they can be at any stage of the buyer’s journey:
They might be ready to buy right away or they could be a year or so from that decision stage.
With a well-planned and executed content strategy, you’ll have content for them in whatever stage they’re in, whether they’re just researching for now or ready to buy after reading your blog post.
When done right, you can use your content to help build relationships with customers who aren’t ready to buy just yet. Help them throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey and when they’re ready to make a decision, as long as you’ve done your job right, they’ll likely choose you.
You can also use your content to continue building relationships with customers post-sale as well.
Delight them after the close and you’ll earn their loyalty long-term. This is the basis of the inbound marketing methodology:
5. A blog helps you acquire more customers.
With blogging, you have opened up a new channel for communication with both existing and potential customers.
Potential customers who may not have found you otherwise are now finding your website and discovering your brand thanks to your blogging efforts.
That alone will help you acquire more leads. Add conversion-focused design and content to it, like CTAs (calls-to-action) and signups, and your potential to acquire customers just grew even more.
Still can’t picture how blogging helps you acquire customers?
Consider this – B2B marketers who use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not.
The numbers are higher for B2C marketers who receive more than 4 times as many leads by regularly using a blog over those that don’t.
6. A blog helps you expand content marketing efforts.
A blog is the beginning of content marketing.
As you build out content on your blog, you’ll open up opportunities to expand your content marketing efforts and have an even bigger impact on your bottom line.
Every blog post you write is content you can share multiple times across various social media platforms, in email newsletters, etc.
A good blog post also provides several opportunities to repurpose it into other types of content and content upgrades, which can then also be shared and used for lead generation, like:
- eBooks and white papers
- Guides, tip-sheets, & checklists
- Images for social media
- A slide deck for SlideShare
- A podcast
- Video(s)
- Webinar(s)
Plus, by maintaining consistent blogging efforts, you’ll also get the benefit of staying focused on your content marketing strategy, which will help you get the most return from the effort you put in.
7. A blog is a cost-effective marketing investment.
Quality, relevant blog posts are content assets that benefit your website long-term.
They keep working for your business all day, every day, regardless of your business hours, building your brand awareness and promoting your expertise to your potential customers.
Yes, good blog posts take time. Time is money, and if you don’t have the time, you’ll spend money to hire someone who can deliver the quality content your blog needs to succeed.
However, if you think about everything you do to market your business and everything you used to have to do to market your business, blogging is a strategy that definitely comes out on top.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take business blogging over hitting the pavement and going door-to-door any day.
Besides, the conversion rate on a good blog is way higher than cold outreach.
8. A blog helps you gain valuable insights into your audience.
Every website should have analytics installed (If yours doesn’t or you don’t know, call us at 717.764.3911).
Looking at the analytics for your blog content, you’ll be able to see which content is the most popular and which content is the least popular.
From the data, you see, you’ll be able to gain insights on what your customers like best in terms of topics, style of post, post length, and more.
You can also identify gaps and then create content to effectively close them.
These insights inform your strategy and allow you to customize your content for your customer to make your blog the most useful, valuable resource it can be.
Blogging for your business builds brand awareness, builds relationships with your customers, increases traffic to your site, increases leads, and more.
Now that you know how blogging benefits your business, what are you waiting for?
See you in the “blogosphere!”
Need help with your blogging efforts?
The copywriters at VIG are ready to lend a helping hand.