Every business stands to benefit by making a blog part of their content marketing efforts. If you want to grow your website traffic, attract new customers, increase brand awareness, and become a leader in your space, blogging helps with all of this.
It’s a key piece of successful digital marketing.
Blogs shouldn’t simply be promotional tools or 200-word posts. They need to offer value to the reader. A blog that is researched and well-written helps move customers along the buyer journey and helps them make informed decisions.
Better yet, the content can be useful for those just starting to do some research. They can even be the final piece that gets someone to the point they’re ready to purchase, take up a craft, or start a business.
If blogging isn’t something your business is doing yet, you need to get started. There are many benefits of blogging for businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small startup or an established brand. Making a blog part of your content marketing efforts will help you grow.
8 Reasons Why a Blog Matters in Your Content Marketing
Here are the 8 top reasons why a blog should be a part of your content marketing tactics:
- Give Your SEO A Boost
- Create Content to Share Elsewhere
- Educate and Nurture Customers
- Generate Leads for Less
- It’s Helpful, Evergreen, and Always Available
- Demonstrate Thought Leadership and Expertise
- Increase the Time Spent on Your Website
- It’s An Affordable Way to Generate Organic Traffic
1) Give Your SEO a Boost
Regularly publishing blog posts to your website can do wonders for your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Consider what blog posts do for a moment: they answer questions, educate readers, and help you demonstrate thought leadership. By doing this more often, visitors will recognize that you know what you’re talking about and you’re going to keep talking about it and helping people in the long run.
Now consider what search engines like Google do for users like you or me: they show us relevant websites that help answer our questions or solve our problems. At the end of the day, search engines want to provide users with the most helpful and useful information.
Blogs can give your SEO efforts a boost in so many ways. Besides just helping you rank higher for more keywords, they create new ways for people to find your website organically through search (more on that later). They also drive more traffic to your website and keep visitors engaged and get them to visit other pages on your website.
All of these are positive ways to show Google and other prominent search engines that your website is useful. The more often you can prove this, the more likely you are going to rank higher for related topics. By adding a blog to your website, you increase the chances of your website showing up more often.
2) Create Content to Share Elsewhere
Blogs are just one form of content marketing. Ultimately, how you choose to share them is up to you. Of course, you could just publish blog posts and let people find them organically through search or by visiting your website. However, blogs can also be shared across your other marketing channels.
If you’re looking for something to post on your Facebook business page, start with some of your blog posts. If you send out a regular newsletter to customers and leads, feature some blog posts the recipient might be interested in reading.
By including a blog in your content marketing strategy, you can reuse the content across other marketing channels and save yourself both time and effort in creating other quality content. Blogs are a very useful way to drive more traffic from your other marketing channels.
3) Educate and Nurture Customers
If you sell a higher ticket product or service, blogs can be a great way to help nurture and educate your customers and prospects.
When someone is in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey, chances are they’ll be doing some research. Having blog posts to educate people about the benefits of what you offer, or to highlight success stories from other customers, can do wonders.
By having the right blog strategy in place, you’ll make it easier for those who are considering a purchase from you to learn why your product or service is the best choice for them.
4) Generate Leads for Less
If you’re looking to lower your advertising costs and generate more leads for less, blogging can help. As mentioned above, your business blog doesn’t have to be the only place people find your posts. Emails and social media posts are both free ways to share content with your target audience.
Paid ads are great, and they allow you to target the people who fit the criteria and interests you define. But they still cost you money. When you create blog posts and share them across other channels, you’re opening doors to your site.
Instead of paying someone to come to your landing page or website because they clicked on or saw an ad, you can bring them to your website for free by having content that captures their interest.
Better yet, blog posts help answer questions and can get a potential customer to a point where they feel ready to move on to the next stage and actually become a customer.
5) It’s Helpful, Evergreen, and Always Available
When you make a Facebook post or send an email, it eventually becomes out of sight and out of mind. Sure, Facebook posts don’t actually go away, they just get pushed further and further down your followers’ timelines and emails often get deleted. I don’t know about you, but when I’m scrolling Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram I’m interested in fresh content. I’m not scrolling so far down my timeline that I see posts from 6 weeks ago. I rarely see content from even 6 hours ago.
The point is, the content you share through email and social media marketing is here one minute and gone the next. But when you use blogs as a part of your content marketing strategy, you’re creating content that can be found by people every second of the day, forever… unless of course, you unpublish it.
Billions of people use search engines every day. Publishing blog posts creates more ways for someone to find you. They could find the post through a specific Google search for information related to the topic of the blog. Or they could stumble upon it from a link on your website or another blog itself.
In any case, having blog content means you have information available that can easily be accessed when someone is searching for that topic.
6) Demonstrate Thought Leadership and Expertise
Blogs can be a great way to build trust amongst your customers and prospects. They allow you to showcase your expertise on a topic and educate customers.
Say, for instance, you’re a personal trainer and gym owner. Having high-quality content about nutrition, workouts, meal prep, and client success stories accomplishes two big things.
First, it shows that you know your stuff and have information and resources to share. Second and more importantly, it gives the reader the reassurance that you’re someone who can help them get the results they’re seeking. You build trust and make them feel more comfortable spending their hard-earned money at your business.
Any type of business can do this. Every industry is unique and there are plenty of topics you can write about. Your customers likely have questions and the thought leadership you demonstrate with your blog posts can help transform someone from a prospect in the research stage to a regular customer.
7) Increase the Time Spent on Your Website
Increasing the average time someone is spending on your website is another way to give your SEO efforts a boost. If someone visits your website and they spend time on the pages instead of just bouncing right away, it shows Google that the content is relevant and helpful to what was being searched.
Remember, Google wants to show users the most helpful information related to the topic they searched. Increasing the average time visitors spend on the page helps validate that your content and website are both helpful and relevant.
This does not necessarily mean that blogs need to be extremely lengthy. Blog posts are usually pretty digestible and a quick read. Sometimes, you might find yourself publishing long-form content that is 3000+ words long.
But most of the time, content that in-depth can be saved for a downloadable resource like a case study or ebook. Generally speaking, most blog posts will be anywhere from 1000-2500 words. Even still, if someone takes 5-10 minutes to read a blog post on your website, that’s 5-10 minutes they aren’t spending on your competitors’ websites.
8) It’s An Affordable Way to Generate Organic Traffic
You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars each month on pay-per-click (PPC) ads for certain keywords or phrases. With the right content strategy in place, you can increase your organic traffic.
Using a hub and spoke content strategy, for instance, can create a series of blog posts that link together and help you rank highly for specific keywords and phrases. Now instead of paying for ads on search engines to appear when someone searches that keyword or phrase, your website is showing up organically instead.
Blogging can be one way to save on business and advertising costs, and reach more people organically instead!
Ready to Get Started?
If you need help developing a content marketing strategy or are looking to lighten the load and have someone research, write, and optimize the content for you, let’s chat. Both our content marketing managed services and okgrow services are helpful ways for your business to make blogging a part of your content strategy.
Contact our team today to learn more and see how we can help you reach more customers!
