Benefits of Business Blogs for Marketing
Blogging helps drive traffic to your website.
Think about the ways customers find your website:
- They could type your company name right in to their browser, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic on top of what you’re already getting.
- You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t do it!), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click on the emails. But that’s expensive and, you know, illegal.
- You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn’t illegal, but can be quite expensive, depends on your marketing plan. And if you run out of money, your traffic stops flowing.
So, how can you drive natural traffic to your website? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines. Here’s how blogging works.
Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right. How often can you really update your About Us page?
Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.
Every time you write a blog post, it is one more page on your website that can be indexed, which means it is another opportunity to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search(the ideal!). We will cover more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later, but it’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content they should index.
Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest – which helps expose your business to new audiences that may not have thought about yet.
Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going – instead of asking your social media team to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that content. You’re adding to your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via social channels.
So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works with search engines and social media to do that.
Blogging helps convert that traffic into leads.
Now that you have traffic coming to your website from your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into business leads.
Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. The way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.
Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free trials, coupons for services… basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information. To be super clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:
- Visitor comes to website
- Visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer
- Visitor clicks call-to-action and gets to a contact form page, to fill in with their information
- Visitor fills out form, submits information, and receives the free offer
- 99.9% of the blog posts the top publishers publish have call-to-action buttons … and yours should, too. That is how you turn traffic coming to your blog into leads for your sales team.
Blogging helps establish authority.
The best business blogs answer common questions their market and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target market and customers, it will help establish you as an authority in their eyes and you become a Subject Matter Expert (or SME).
Establishing authority can be a hard to measure metric – certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it’s pretty powerful stuff and helps your overall branding. Think about the opportunities blogging presents:
- If prospects find answers to their questions via blog posts written by people at your company, they’re much more likely to trust the sales process because you’ve helped them in the past, even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
- Customers or prospects that read your blog posts will enter the sales process more educated on your place in the industry, your market, and what you have to offer. That makes for a more productive sales conversation chance than between two relative strangers.
Blogging drives long-term results.
Let’s say you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let’s say that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you’ve netted 150 views and 15 leads. It’s not done. That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post.
In fact, for top trafficked sites about 70% of the traffic each month comes from posts that weren’t published in the current month. They come from old posts. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month — about 90% of the leads generated every month come from blog posts that were published in previous months. Sometimes years ago.
Are you already well underway when it comes to business blogging? Just starting out? Share your thoughts on business blogging below and what you’re looking to get out of it.