Just start it already.
If you’ve been on the fence about launching a business blog – either contemplating broaching the idea to your boss or staring at your laptop trying to convince yourself to start typing – now’s the time. In fact, there might never be a better time than now.
In the current consumer climate, the benefits of blogging are simply too numerous to pass up. Content marketing is more than just a passing fad. The marketing pendulum has swung squarely from outbound to inbound, as consumers now expect you to earn their interest through providing helpful content, rather than buy their interest through advertising.
When you commit to being a runner, you subject yourself to potential soreness and discomfort. You might even encounter a strong headwind or angry canine while out on a jog. Yet you reap a great bounty of rewards for your aerobic efforts. These include stress relief, weight control, strengthened lungs, disease prevention and, of course, impressing a love interest.
The same is true of blogging for business. Sure, doing so requires an investment of time and resources on your part. But from a costs vs. rewards standpoint, the benefits of blogging are as clear as a Key West sunset.
Here are seven reasons your blog can serve as a huge asset for your business:
1. Increased Traffic to Your Website
More visitors to your company website is never a bad thing. When you can consistently produce fresh blog content that’s relevant to your audience, Google and other search engines will take notice. Each new blog post you publish gets indexed by search engines and represents another chance for your website to show up in organic search results, especially if you included longtail keywords for optimal SEO. Provided your content is of high quality and relevant, a “more is better” approach to blogging volume works well, enabling you to cast a wider net for your brand across the Internet.
2. 24/7/365 Accessibility
Like IHOP, your business blog is open 24 hours per day, seven days per week.And although it can’t make you a stack of pancakes, your blog posts can be accessed by your online audience or located in search engine results by prospective customers at all hours of day and night. Barring a major technical difficulty, your business blog won’t need to place any day-off requests at all. You won’t find a human employee who can match that capability.
3. Relationship-Building Opportunities with Customers
No one wants to be forgotten by core customers, nor overlooked by prospective clients. A successful business blog enables you to stay top-of-mind with your customer base, as you create various avenues for ongoing engagement. Disseminate your blog posts as email newsletters, post them on your social media platforms and encourage interactive feedback from your readership. Not only will you strengthen the online rapport you have with your customer base, but you’ll also gather useful insight regarding what drives your customers’ decision-making.
4. Brand Positioning as Industry Authority
Your business blog’s ability to provide consistently valuable content gives you an opportunity to emerge as an authority within your industry. High-traffic blogs become so by rewarding visitors with answers to their frequently-asked questions. If your tax services company can produce content that effectively answers questions like “What’s the easiest way to file my taxes?” and “How can I maximize my tax return?” then you’ll gain appeal in the eyes of your prospective customers. In the best-case scenario, your company evolves into a thought leader and your blog serves as a go-to site when readers seek information regarding a particular topic.
5. Conversion of Web Visitors into Leads
Ultimately, an effective business blog has a higher purpose beyond simply educating and entertaining its audience. When you succeed at driving traffic to your website through your blog, you can then prompt your audience to take another action in their buyer journey, converting that Web traffic into qualified leads within your sales funnel. Of all benefits of blogging, this is perhaps the most important, as it’s where revenue generation potential enters the equation. On average, B2B companies that blog generate 67 percent more leads per month than those that don’t.
6. Strong Return On Investment Potential
In most cases, blogging for business costs significantly less than traditional outbound marketing techniques like television and print advertising. In fact, it’s estimated that inbound marketing costs 62 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing. Yet inbound marketing strategies like blogging can also deliver more overall leads into your sales funnel when compared with outdated advertising tactics. This combination of lower costs yet improved results bodes well for your business, demonstrating how the major benefit of blogging is that it can can produce real ROI.
7. Longterm Utility
On average, we conduct 12 billion searches per month on the Web in the United States. Undoubtedly, this figure will only grow in the coming years. Once your blog post gets ranked in search engines, it has the potential to generate website traffic and leads for the long haul. And by repurposing your best content after it’s originally published, you can reinforce your message across various channels and maximize a blog post’s longterm effectiveness. You’ve worked hard on crafting a blog post that successfully solves a problem for your audience, so you should reap the benefits of blogging for days, weeks, months and years to come.
