Written by Sean Wolstencroft, Associate
The short answer is yes. Living at a time when almost everything is searched for online, your business must make the most of the digital resources available to it. One such resource is the blog. This month’s post looks at the particular benefits blogging can bring to your company and outlines the process of how to do it well.
The advantages of having a business blog
First things first: what is a blog? A blog is a regularly updated webpage, usually written by an individual or small group, whose aim is to share information, knowledge or stories. Blogs are long-form content, giving you the scope to be comprehensive and detailed in what you communicate and expressive in how.
So, what does this mean in terms of promoting a business?
1. Blogs allow you to demonstrate your business’s expertise within a given field and present it as an authority on a given subject, thereby encouraging potential customers to turn to you — rather than your competitors — when they need a particular problem solved.
2. Blogs enable you to communicate in a style representative of your brand through your choice of words and emotional tone. Conveying your ‘brand voice’ in this way helps to show customers what makes your business both distinct and authentic.
3. Blogs allow you to publish content regularly. This helps generate and maintain interest in your business and foster a loyal online community.
4. Regularly posting content will also enhance the visibility of your business by attracting traffic to your website. More traffic increases the likelihood of making more sales.
In effect, blogs enable businesses to market their brand and improve their online presence in a nuanced yet meaningful way.
It is worth emphasising that the point of a blog is not to ‘hard-sell’ a product or service. Instead, blogs are a means of establishing a deeper connection with your audience, one that conveys your credentials as a business. In this sense, blogs become a valuable tool in the sales process, helping to attract and convert prospective customers into paying ones.
How to write a successful business blog
For the uninitiated, blog writing may seem a relatively easy task. However, getting it right in terms of how it’s written, uploaded and publicised requires know-how. A business blog needs to be professional, it needs to reach an audience, and it needs to generate a reader response.
The first step to achieving this is writing well. Bloggers must clearly understand who the target reader is and appreciate what they want to know. Not only will this help determine the purpose of your blog posts, but it will also provide focus.
Inexperienced bloggers tend to be discursive, and their posts can lack structure, making it hard for the reader to digest information. When this happens, any intended outcome is undermined.
The second stage to writing a successful blog is to maximise its reach, thereby improving its ‘online performance’. It’s paramount that as many people as possible know about it and have the chance to read it.
For this to happen, blogs need to be categorised and tagged correctly on your website, and they should also include keywords to help optimise their ranking in search engine results. Promoting your blog via other media channels will also significantly improve the likelihood of people reading and sharing it.
As you publish your blogs, study how they perform through analytic tools and take the time to identify any content gaps through research. Your findings should feed into an editorial calendar that has a clear strategic intent.
To finish, let’s take a look at some figures regarding blogs and their significance to businesses:
- 8 out of 10 marketers publish blog posts to help reach their overall marketing goals (Oberlo, 2020).
- 80% of companies that use blogs for their marketing strategy said they acquired customers from their blogging efforts (HubSpot, 2020).
- 70% of online marketers say content creation is their most effective SEO strategy (Optinmonster, 2021).
- Blogs are rated as the 5th most trusted source for online information accuracy. (Optinmonster, 2021).
- The biggest challenges that bloggers face are finding time to create and promote content (52%), driving traffic (47%), consistently creating quality content (38%), publishing a sufficient number of posts (32%), coming up with relevant topics (19%), and getting enough support from the organisation (15%) (Orbit Media, 2020).
To have spent time working on a blog for it to have little impact can be discouraging. More importantly, it’s a missed opportunity to promote your business in a way that effectively persuades potential customers. If you don’t have the time to produce blogs that deliver results, Orchard VA can help through our associated team of content writers. Contact HELLO@ORCHARD-VA.CO.UK.
