Competition has become fiercer than ever in the world of online business. To survive and build a thriving business, you must differentiate yourself and stand out from your competition. Blogging is one of the most simple and effective strategies you can adopt to help promote your brand’s visibility, enhance your company’s reputation, and bring in new business.
How important is blogging for businesses? Businesses that blog get 55% more visitors to their website than businesses that don’t blog. According to research conducted by Hubspot, companies that produce blogs consistently generate 68% more leads per month than companies that do not have blogs. Blogging can enhance your brand’s exposure, and increase your company’s sales.
Blogging is a powerful marketing strategy that can boost organic traffic to your company’s website, helping support growth and success.
What is Business Blogging?
Business blogging is producing high-quality and informative content relevant to the company’s products, services, and industry to engage the target audience. The goal of business blogging is to promote the company’s products to the target market in a discreet and non-salesy manner.
Traditional advertising is slowly losing its influence over people’s purchasing decisions as modern consumers have become disillusioned with in-your-face advertising. Marketing research by Business Inside and AdAge has revealed that 70% of internet users prefer to learn about a brand or product through content rather than advertising.
If a business can produce compelling and educational content on a consistent basis, they will be seen as knowledgeable in their field by their target audience and peers in the industry. This practice will enhance the brand’s reputation, resulting in increased sales and profits as consumers are more likely to purchase from brands they perceive to be authentic and trustworthy.
Blogging Improves Organic Traffic to Your Website
There are over 5 billion searches made online every day, and search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine which sites appear in search results. Blogging builds a profile of information on your site that helps your visitors. Search engines see that and will direct even more search traffic your way.
Relevant visitors on your site often turn into customers or qualified leads over time, which organically build your business.
SEO-Optimize Your Blog Posts
For the best results, you’ll have to optimize your blog content with relevant keywords. These help to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) and help to ensure that you get more visitors, and the right kind of visitors that will interact with your posts and bring the most to your business.
Incorporate keywords and phrases in your blog posts that a prospect might use to search for your content or products. Use these terms judiciously throughout the content, the metadata of the web page, and even the alt text (image text) for the best results.
The higher your page ranks for a specific keyword or phrase in the SERPs, the more organic traffic your website can acquire. To rank high in the SERPs, you must build a solid online reputation and consistently produce high-quality, SEO-optimized blog posts. Your brand’s credibility and the quality of content you produce will determine your ranking in the SERPs.
Blogging Boosts Your Social Media Presence
Blogging is a great strategy to further enhance your social media presence. You can use the content in your blog to create many new and engaging social media posts. These posts can even be shared between your audience and their followers on multiple social media channels, introducing your brand to new and diverse audiences.
Think of all the different types of users on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and how sharing your blog content with them can help you get discovered by audiences you could not target in your search engine optimization campaign. Sharing your blog content on social media and providing a link to the blog page on your website is another effective method to increase your website’s visitors.
Blogging Promotes Brand Visibility
Producing SEO-optimized blog posts and sharing blog content on social media will maximize your brand’s exposure. Driving traffic to your website from search engines and social media channels will expose your business to target and non-target audiences, enhancing brand awareness through increased visibility and word of mouth.
The popularity of a brand matters to consumers. Many people prefer to purchase from well-known brands as they associate brand popularity with high-quality products. Increasing your brand’s visibility exposes your business to a greater number of consumers and helps change people’s perception of your brand.
Increasing brand awareness also improves brand perception, and blogging is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing strategies to help you achieve that goal.
Blogging Helps You Build Brand Reputation
Blogging will give you an opportunity to build your brand’s reputation and establish clout in your industry. Producing high-quality, educational content consistently will help you develop a reputation as an authority and subject-matter expert in your field. When you demonstrate your knowledge and expertise of the industry and its related subject areas, you will be perceived as a thought leader and a trustworthy brand.
Most consumers prefer to buy products from reputable brands they trust. Blogging is a great strategy to build brand reputation and gain the trust of your prospects. To help your brand stand out from the rest of your rivals, produce well-researched, informative, and educational content on a consistent basis to create value for your readers. The hard work will pay off, in the form of brand prominence and increased sales and profits for your company.
Blogging Increases Sales
Blogging increases traffic to your website via search engines and social media sharing. Each one of those website visitors is an opportunity to make a sale. As visitors to your site become familiar with your products and services, they are more likely to purchase from you when they need a product similar to what you offer.
Not every website visitor will be converted to a customer, but even a small percentage of conversions will translate to more sales and profits for your business. Blogging has very low conversion costs, leading to very profitable sales for your business. The more people you drive to your website, the more opportunities you will have to make a sale and generate profits.
Improve Blogs’ Conversion Rate
To increase your blogs’ lead generation and conversion rates, make sure to add a call-to-action at the end of each blog post to engage the reader and compel them to act. You can place a call-to-action at the end of your blog posts to direct prospects to a landing page, product page, or make them fill out a form with their personal information in exchange for a special offer. This strategy can improve your website’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate.
Blogging Strengthens Relationships with New and Existing Customers
Blogging helps you build a relationship with your prospects and customers through the provision of free, high-quality, and informative content. Your readers will appreciate the effort you expend to produce content that educates them and improves their knowledge and understanding. Many of your readers will reciprocate your gesture of goodwill by purchasing from you or becoming loyal customers.
A report by Demand Metric revealed that 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading an authentic content produced by them. The report also found that 78% of consumers perceive a relationship between themselves and the company after consuming their content, and 70% feel closer to a company through content marketing, which includes blogging.
How to Enhance Blogger-Customer Relationship
To develop and strengthen relationships with your prospects and customers through blogging, write your blogs in a conversational tone in order to sound like you’re speaking with your readers. Add a comments section at the end of your blogs to allow you and the reader to have a conversation and engage with one another. These strategies will help you build a deeper bond with your readers, resulting in customer loyalty and increased sales for your business.
Blogging is the Most Cost-Efficient Strategy to Build a Thriving Business
Blogging is the most cost-efficient marketing strategy to enhance your brand’s visibility, build a reputation, and increase your company’s sales. It requires minimal upfront costs, and generates a higher ROI compared to traditional advertising for your business.
While it’s necessary to produce high-quality blog posts frequently to reap its full benefits, older blogs that have established their authority and are ranked in the SERPs will drive traffic to your website for years to come.