There are many reasons and benefits for using a blog as an intricate marketing tool through which you can express your personal point of view and provide the reader with important understandings of how your business, products, or services work.
By openly talking about any problems that the business may have overcome or achievements made adds a personal element to the business as a living entity rather than a soulless corporation.
Below are some of the benefits that result from creating a blog:
1.Brand Awareness
Benefits:
- Being able to reach new readers and educate current followers is essential for ensuring that your readers are aware of your brand and the product or services it provides.
- Whether you are a start-up business or a well-established brand, creating and maintaining brand awareness is vital to remain ahead of the competition.
- By being at the forefront of your readers’ minds makes it easier to remember what the brand represents and how it can benefit the reader.
2. Building a Community
Benefits:
- By building a community of followers you can directly target and educate an audience that is interested in what you have to offer.
- The community you build is more likely to talk about and share what you have to offer, which can add to stronger social signals. The more shares, comments, likes, and followers you get, the better social rankings will be achieved.
- When influential writers, bloggers, and followers are retweeting and commenting on your blog post, this will increase the weight given to your work, furthering the trust relationship with the end-user.
- Blogs can also be emailed to your consumers through your newsletters and shared through social media which will help increase the readership and awareness of the topics covered in the blog.
- The blog can also be beneficial for reviews and provide an area where existing customers can leave feedback. This is particularly beneficial for product/service development.
- When a new prospect is reading the blog, it can help in the sales process to convert potential prospects into paying customers.
3. Answer the questions users are asking
Benefits:
- Use social media to find out what is trending or what people are searching for and then write a blog post relating to their questions. You can also then share the blog post with a hashtag relating to the topic which is more likely to get mentioned or shared.
- Blogs are a great platform for answering questions that people in your industry may be asking. By answering these questions, you not only increase traffic to your blog as it is a hot topic, but it also shows you as an authority or expert and the person to go to – increasing brand loyalty.
- Forums and groups are a great place to find the questions your prospects are asking. Remember not to just join a forum and post links back to your website as administrators and readers may take you for a spammer and either block you from the forum or even worse, damage your reputation as a brand.
4. Social Signals and Link Building
Benefits:
- Sharing your blog post across social media groups boosts social media signals back to your website increasing awareness of the brand, traffic, comments, likes, and shares. The more likes, positive comments, and shares the easier it would be to convert a reader into a customer.
- Social media can additionally help build link juice (links from one website to another, increasing ranking factors). Link Building is one of the three pillars of SEO and is fundamental to getting page rankings.
5. Page Rankings and Keywords
Benefits:
- Whether you choose to write a blog daily, weekly, or fortnightly, the new content will be crawled by search engine spiders helping to increase the page ranking of your website (as long as the content is relevant).
- By targeting keywords through the blog relating to your business, services, or product, you can improve the organic search results reducing the cost of paid campaigns.
- Technically optimizing a blog correctly (adding meta tags, internal/external links, alt tags, etc.) will also help produce better results within the SERPs.
Some businesses do not have the resources or the time to create a blog and often hire a ghostwriter or guest blogger to help curate the content for the blog.
To summarise, a business blog will help create a community of followers, increase brand awareness, educate your followers, get better page rankings within search engines, help with link building and keywords, answer the questions people are asking and hopefully lead to more sales for the business.