Posted by Increasing your presence online is a complex process that will require inventiveness, consistency in posting, as well as some understanding of SEO.
The thing is, how your business fares online are not merely down to how you organize your company’s website. Indeed, if you can juggle your social media pages, the website, as well as a blog page, you have the opportunity to drastically increase your company’s online popularity – and for pretty much no money invested, too.
You see, since creating accounts on all the major social media platforms out there is completely free, and the fees for setting up a blog tend to be negligible, you can create a powerful voice for your company simply by investing some of your time.
In this article, we’re going to talk about blogging, in particular.
To be precise, we’ll list ten benefits of using blogging for marketing purposes. As you will see, constantly posting relevant and reader-friendly content on your blog pages can have far-reaching positive effects on your company’s online standing. So, if you’re interested in getting onboard this simple but rather effective marketing strategy, here’s the deal.
1) Helps You Build A Network
When it comes to expanding your business online, building a powerful network of peers is of utmost importance.
Now, what blogging does is it gives you a platform where you can talk about things that matter to your company. You can make announcements about your upcoming products or services, comment on the industry at the moment, and reach out to your customers.
What you can also do with blogging is to share a lot of links and references in your content, which means you’ll get to reach out to many important people and connect with them via your blog. This will give you the basis for your online expansion, as having an influential roster of contacts can mean the difference between setting up interesting and lucrative business ventures, and just sitting idly where you are doing nothing.
2) Link Acquisition
As we already hinted at in the section above, links play an important role in increasing your online footprint, so to speak.
When blogging is in question, we’re mostly talking about inbound links. That said, these links leading back to your website are incredibly useful for increasing the number of visitors not only to your website’s homepage but more importantly – to your online store, where members of your audience can make purchases.
3) Relationship Building
It is estimated that it takes up to 25 times the amount of money (though this figure is often lower, but still) to attract a brand new customer from scratch than to retain an already existing one.
This is why it’s so important to have a communicational platform where you can reach out to your faithful customers and update them on any new products or services you have coming up. The goal here is to let them know you value their decision to purchase with you, and that you want to keep delivering down the road.
4) Developing Authority in Your Niche
Posting well-written articles on your blog page on a regular basis and keeping in touch with both your business partners and your customers in the niche at all times is what is eventually going to make you an authority in your field.
What this means is that the members of your audience will believe in what you have to say and that they’ll be willing to commit to following it, too. So, if you’ve built up enough of a reputation in your field and you put out a new product you’ve been working on, your customers are more likely to purchase it than if you are just starting out.
What you need to make this happen is post regularly articles that are to-the-point, easy to read, and that solve some problems your customers may be facing.
5) Better Communication with Customers
While your social media pages and the ‘contact us’ page on your website will certainly attract some people who want to contact you, it is also true that this sort of contact is mostly reserved for resolving technical issues and otherwise exchanging small updates.
That said, a blog page can help you do way more.
The reason this is the case is that you get to write a long post on your blog to which your customers can respond in the comments and then you can have a meaningful back and forth.
With social media pages, for example, long posts are often frowned upon, so you don’t get to express yourself as easily as you can with blogging.
6) Learning About Your Clients
By seeing how your audience responds to your posts, you can get some idea about where their affinities lie and what is interesting to them.
This is especially true in situations when your audience members venture to comment on your posts, of course. Then you can see first-hand what they care about and what their feelings are about your writing.
This way, once you’ve learned some valuable pieces of info about your audience, you can start tailoring your posts so that they fit better with what they may want to hear and what they’re interested in.
7) Increased Conversion Rates
Although blog posts are often seen as only an addition to your main company’s website and other online assets, they can be used for gaining leads as well as for linking out to your website’s store page.
The way you do this is fairly simple – add some CTA’s to your blog posts and the folks who visit you will be able to go directly to the shopping cart part of the deal, so to speak.
Of course, if you’re going to do this, you may want to tweak the content a little bit, too, so that the entire page doesn’t appear to be too ‘salesy’ and aggressive.
8) More Traffic to Your Main Website
When it comes to driving traffic to your main company website, one of the least expensive and the most efficient ways to do this is through your blog posts.
The thing is, there’s no limit to how many links you can insert in your content, and since everyone who visits your blog will already be more or less on the same page as you in terms of their affinity to your company, adding those links won’t feel forced or unnatural, so you can do it to your heart’s content.
9) Better Search Engine Ranking
You take a body of text, add some links to it, use proper SEO and you will make it instantly search engine-friendly.
As you know already, the best way to increase your presence online as a company is to rank highly on search engines, so creating excellent content on your blog, posting regularly, and adding some smart links is all you need to make it. If you feel too overwhelmed by juggling keywords and optimizing your content, you can always get an SEO agency on board to help you out.
10) Long-Term Brand Building
Last but not least, maintaining a blog with plenty of valuable posts, links, keywords, as well as an active audience that cares about its content is slowly but surely going to help you build or reinforce your company’s brand.
As you know, this would be the goal of digital marketing in the first place, so by simply not giving up and posting regularly, you eventually start emerging as a trustworthy brand people can rely on.
All in all, blogging represents one of the least expensive and a decently powerful marketing strategy and while it shouldn’t be the only one in your marketing arsenal, so to speak, not including it in there would be just plain silly. Doesn’t cost much, you can post whenever you like, you get to pitch products, make contacts, and build meaningful business relationships. Simply put – creating a blog for your company is an absolute must.
Maggie Holmes is a passionate blogger who writes on renovation, fashion, Technology and business. Her hobby is to surf the net to find amazing articles that can inspire her with some fresh ideas for article writing. She loathes being a common person who wastes her time. Follow her on Twitter.