Are Business Blogs Worth The Effort?
What is a business blog?
Beyond your company website, a blog is a fantastic tool to keep your audience in the loop about your business. While a website might be more practical in content and straightforward in tone, a blog offers more flexibility to connect with customers, to share updates in a way that shows who you are, not just what you do.
The main difference between a blog and a website is that a blog’s content tends to be updated often and, in most cases, websites are static with very few updates. A website content usually consists of separate pages for details such as contact us, products, and services.
While personal blogs are still wildly popular, blogs have also grown to become a powerful business tool. Business blogging is a marketing tactic that uses blogging to get your business more online visibility. A business blog is a marketing channel (just like social media, direct mail, email marketing, etc.) that helps support business growth.
Blogs focus on content, usually called blog posts. Blogs will usually display these posts in an order where the newest post appears first, and so on. Blogs often have a comments section below the blog posts. These allow for interaction with users.
Benefits of Business Blogs
Overall Rationale
With half of B2B researchers being millennials and 90% of researchers using the internet to gather information prior to purchasing decisions, it’s more essential than ever before to ensure that your company both appears in these searches and outranks competitors.
🎯 Companies who maintain a blog receive 97% more links to their website
🎯 B2B marketers who blog get 67% more leads than those who don’t
🎯 Marketers who prioritise their blog are 13x more likely to see positive ROI
🎯 Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages (hint: this is huge for SEO purposes.)
Primary reasons for creating and maintaining business blogs typically include traffic, search engine
ranking, and growing brand awareness. Secondary reasons can be conversions, product launches
or feature releases, educational or step-by-step instructional content, or providing templates or materials for your audience.
Blogging has an exponential long term impact and serves as a traffic generator for months and years after publishing. When you publish high-quality, relevant content, you generate clicks to your articles, which then rise to the top of the search engine results page. You build your site up as a resource and expert, collect, and convert leads, and create high-value real estate that can serve as a tool for your business.
Inexpensive Marketing Strategy
Blogging is an inexpensive marketing strategy that allows you to open a dialogue with your audience and provide useful information, all while keeping your brand top of mind. The main investment is typically time rather than money.
Increases customer engagement
They give visitors an opportunity to voice their opinion about the content that you are producing. Visitors can ask questions and give feedback as well. A two-way conversation will help to build social proof, thereby increasing conversions.
Brand Differentiation
By having a blog, you can let your readers know more about you. It becomes easier for your readers to differentiate your brand. Often, it is difficult to judge the personality of website owners. Blogs allow these to be presented easily.
Up Your SEO Game
Blogging is good for SEO because it helps with a number of things that are important ranking factors. When you have a blog that’s updated regularly with blog posts that are high quality and on topics relevant to your audience, it can make a huge difference to how your overall website performs in search engines.
Strategies for a Successful Blog
Creating a buyer persona is a great way to identify how you’ll be using your blog. What is this ideal customer searching for online? Where do they get their information?
Now that you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to consider what you want to gain from them finding and reading your blog. The goals could be to drive traffic, generate subscribers, convert leads, retain/convert customers or/and brand awareness for example.
You will need to consider how frequently you will create content, what types of content you will post, your goals for the post/blog article, how social media will factor in, and keyword research strategies. When it comes to the content, consider balancing the content type such as – infographics, how-to posts, list posts etc. Also, consider evergreen content and making your content always relevant and it will have a long-term benefit.
Physically writing your blog requires that you have an appropriate blogging tool / content management system. If you have a WordPress website or many other websites, it can be configured to enable the creation and publishing of your blog content.
The tools you use and the ability to track analytics should also be considered, such as installing google analytics tracking or/other martech tools.
To promote your blog, consider other aspects of your marketing activities, such as social media and leverage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. Also, don’t forget using email strategies such as RSS news feed automated emails that will email your contacts the new blog just published. Create custom imagery to share on social and remember to always be testing—see where and how your blog posts perform best. It doesn’t end here, you can consider PR, Influencer, Guest Blogging and Paid Ads to support your strategy and goals.
Don’t forget you want to try to make money from your blogging efforts. Traffic and conversions will give you a platform for retargeting and nurturing, build your subscribers and continue to push them towards being customers.
One final strategy to consider is to repurpose your blog content. It can take many hours to write a blog, but the content can be broken down into other small pieces of content to create lots of social media posts or email campaigns or be used with other marketing tactics.
Pro Tip: Make sure to have a call to action (CTA) on your blog to encourage your reader to take the action you want them to take. e.g., Subscribe, Download the Free eBook, Book A Call, Make an Enquiry etc.
Items to Consider in the structure of your blog
Having an author’s name on the blog can build trust and make sure to include a publishing date as it can show recency.
Like any document / presentation, a blog is no different, make sure to have a catchy title, introduction of sorts, a main core body element, helpful information, guidance, and tips.
Finally, think about your final reflection/conclusion and call to action (CTA).
Final Thoughts
Blogs are a low-cost strategy that any business can use, and they will help you grow your business.
Use the above strategies to get going with your business blog. Remember Google doesn’t discriminate and anyone can create blogs and reap the benefits on google regardless of business size.
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Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
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Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
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If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
