7 Key Benefits of Blogging for Your Business
In today’s digital-first era, establishing an online presence is not only beneficial for organizations, it’s imperative in order to remain competitive.
Whether your organization has already implemented a digital content marketing strategy, or if you’re new to the scene, blogging for your business has several benefits; it’s a powerful and accessible tool to help businesses grow their bottom line.
Not only are blogs an easy way for organizations to share valuable educational content or product updates with customers and prospects, it’s also a cost-effective way to engage with users and ultimately convert new leads. Blogging can help form the foundation of a strong content marketing strategy, helping organizations establish themselves as industry thought leaders, providing users with valuable content, and ultimately, increasing website traffic and engagement.
This blog details the benefits of blogging for your business and how to optimize blogging as an effective and practical digital marketing tool.
Establish Brand Authority and Become a Thought Leader
Blogging can help humanize a brand and contribute to building a distinct personality and identity for your website and business. Blog topics don’t have to be overly technical or product-centric; in fact, blogs are a great way to simplify more technical topics and engage a broader audience than product experts or IT personas. Maintaining a business blog can not only help build trust and reliability with customers and prospects, it’s also the perfect vehicle for demonstrating broader industry expertise and sharing valuable knowledge with readers.
Becoming a thought leader in your own space is perhaps one of the most important marketing factors for any CEO or business owner. Rather than focusing on selling your product or services, blogs can serve as an opportunity to focus on answering questions or providing innovative approaches to industry-wide issues or challenges. Through consistent, quality content, blogs are the perfect channel to educate and engage a broad audience, establish a loyal following, and bring your brand authority to new heights.
Provide Valuable Content for Users and Prospects
Blogging is a way for businesses to produce valuable and educational thought leadership content, address key industry challenges or provide responses to common questions. Thought leadership content is the perfect opportunity to offer high-quality content to users and prospects, and ultimately become an industry reference with an engaged following.
Additionally, blogging can be an opportunity to share company news, feature guest blogs from partners or industry experts, or share client success stories.
The ultimate goal of blogging — aside from being a strong marketing tool — is to share timely, relevant, and engaging information and content with customers and prospects. It provides users with valuable information that, with enough consistency, can help your organization establish itself as an industry leader or subject matter expert.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
One of the more impressive benefits of blogging for your business is the increase in traffic your website will receive. Every lead-generation strategy aims to drive visitors to the company website. The more traffic, the higher possibility of lead conversion and long-term results. Blogs can be a great opportunity for organizations to appear in search engine results and help boost website traffic. In fact, a recent Hubspot study shows that businesses that blog consistently generate 67% more leads than those that don’t.
Each relevant, quality blog is a new opportunity to appear on search engine results pages. By leveraging the appropriate search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and including the appropriate keywords, blogs can exponentially increase website traffic and engagement, making them a powerful, easy-to-implement marketing tool.
Essentially, blogs are an ideal way to give search engines that extra little nudge to grow website traffic and generate quality leads.
Convert Leads and Drive Long Term Results
Beyond increasing overall website traffic, using a well-defined content strategy and publishing quality blog content can help bring in more qualified, targeted leads that can become new business, driving long-term results.
Providing a call to action (CTA) or links to related content or key website pages is a great way to engage prospects further, provide them with relevant information, and ultimately, drive potential buyers through the funnel. Including a pertinent CTA at the end of a blog post encourages readers to engage further with your content and hopefully explore your services — the perfect port of entry to retain new users.
Additionally, links to gated content, such as eBooks, product demos, or promoting events or webinars, can help retain quality leads from new users who present a genuine interest in your content and offerings.
It’s worth to note that not all blogs will generate leads, but offering consistent, quality content across a range of different topics can help build long-term results.
Build Interest Without Breaking the Bank
Rather than immediately investing in marketing, such as search engine advertising or social media ads, blogging is an affordable marketing tool that provides the foundation for broader marketing campaigns.
Additionally, blogging on key industry topics will drive new users to your website organically, purely out of topic interest. Engaging blog posts can bring traffic and potential leads to a website without the additional cost.
Not only is it cost-effective, but blogging is also a straightforward and time-efficient task. With a user-friendly content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Hubspot, content becomes simple to create, schedule, and publish. Even more so, a good CMS can assist with indexing and keyword optimization. Once employees get acclimated to a CMS, developing and publishing blogs becomes easy and second nature.
Fuel Your Social Media Presence
Rather than using additional resources to consistently create unique content to share on social media channels, blogs provide content to be leveraged on all marketing channels, including social media. Promoting blogs on social media can help build a consistent social media presence, boost awareness around your brand, increase reach, and expose your content to potential or new audiences. A strong social media presence that promotes informative and engaging content can help grow your following, attract new users, and build a loyal network within your niche.
Improve Link Building and Domain Authority
Accompanied by a solid SEO strategy, blogging can help businesses improve domain authority by growing the number of quality backlinks and inbound links. Inbound links are an important factor in a search engine’s algorithm when generating top search results.
By creating valuable and pertinent content, key industry leaders are more likely to see your content as a reference and link back to your page, helping your business to become a reference in the industry and growing both your domain authority and credibility over time.
In Summary
Blogging presents many benefits for businesses, from personalizing brand identity, establishing credibility as an industry thought leader, and of course, converting traffic to drive sales. All it takes to begin is a well-defined content calendar, clear marketing objectives, and adequate resources to write consistent, quality blogs across a range of industry subjects. Blogs are a straightforward and affordable means to market your business, and an integral part of any successful organization’s online presence.
To learn more about how Instinctive can help spearhead your blog strategy and creation, visit our Blog Services Page.