Congratulations, you’ve started blogging for business! But you don’t have a team of writers or videographers behind you, and you’re not really sure why blogging for business is so important.
And you’re not really a writer, truth be told, so it feels like a struggle. Plus it takes so much time! What you really want to know is…
Do I really need to be blogging as a business?
The answer is yes, sorry, it’s essential to your digital marketing strategy. In this post, I’ll count down my top 5 reasons why blogs are the cornerstone of business marketing strategies for brands the world over…
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5 – Feed Your Social Channels
By blogging as a business, you’re creating content that can feed into your other marketing channels, for example social media and e-newsletters.
You want to send your network an email but you don’t know what to put in it. Easy! Your last couple of blog posts will provide you with the basis for a great e-newsletter.
Got a Facebook page that’s sitting there stagnating, with nothing to keep fans entertained or encourage growth? Sure you do, if you don’t have a blog.
***UPDATE: Now that Facebook’s updated its algorithm to the detriment of brand pages, your blog posts are going to have less impact on your Facebook audience. However, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages need content too!
Make sure your blog is regularly refreshed with picture galleries, videos and written updates that your audience will find interesting, then feed the rest of your channels with it.
4 – Boost SEO
SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. It’s basically all about how you get a higher ranking in Google search results.
Jayson DeMers provides an excellent analogy to explain SEO:
“In terms of search engine rankings, I like to think of blogging as fishing. … Every new page you publish is like dropping another hook in the water. With more opportunities for your target market to find your bait, the more bites you’ll get. The more blog posts you have, the more chances you have to rank for various keywords.”
And with more hooks in the water, the more fish – I mean, visitors – you are going to get to your website.
‘Nuff said.
3 – Increase Sales Leads
The higher you rank in search results and the more website traffic you get, the more sales leads are going to come in.It really is a numbers game.
Plus, this report by Hubspot shows that the more pages a site has, the more leads it gets.Since each blog post on your website counts as a page, it follows that the more you blog, the more sales leads you generate.
2 – Free Marketing
A blog is one of the best ways to establish yourself or your brand as an expert in your field, developing what marketers love to call “thought-leadership”. (Click here for more marketing jargon words explained!)
It’s a platform for sharing information and insights of interest and relevance to your customers. When you do this regularly, they’ll keep coming back, choosing you as their go-to source of information. Marketers like to call this “adding value”.
Plus, every time you blog, you create an opportunity for your audience to share with others a URL that leads people back to your website.Whether they link to it in a blog post of their own, share it on social media, or email it to others, it’s basically free marketing and it helps to build your business.
1 – Brand Storytelling
For us at Narrative Marketing, this has to be the number 1 reason why you should be blogging for business.
Brand storytelling is the art of telling your business stories to create meaningful connections with your customers, motivating them to choose you again and again.
An effective brand narrative is what leads people to brand loyalty, the holy grail for all businesses. Brand storytelling humanises a business. It turns it from a soulless entity into something we can understand. (For more reasons why storytelling is the best approach in marketing, read this blog post.)
Blogging facilitates brand storytelling in a really cost-effective way. It allows a company to look its audience in the eye, digitally.
If you’re struggling to find the time to craft relevant, optimised blog content, we can help! All the information you need to know about our content writing services is on this page. Just shout if you have any questions.
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