In case you’ve been under a rock, content marketing is the new kid on the school of marketing’s campus.
Content marketing reaches out to help and build trust with customers. In addition, it also helps businesses gain more visibility if content is optimized using SEO best practices.
For both reasons, any company benefits from starting a blog and updating it regularly. Even businesses that already enjoy a nice top spot on SERPs – thanks to their social media interaction or content filled webpages – should start a company blog.
If lack of time is a concern, there are web marketing firms that will gladly handle blogging for you. However, in order to get the most out of your investment, be sure you give due diligence when researching and selecting a professional firm that only does high quality work. Your web presence depends on it.
Besides further optimizing your website for search engine marketing (SEM), there are a few more reasons a blog works wonders in furthering companies’ interactions with target audiences.
4 MORE reasons you should be blogging
Blogs increase website traffic
Once you’ve established a regular schedule for posting to the company blog, begin to share posts online through social media and blog comment linking. If content is interesting, engaging and helpful, traffic will come.
A blog gives people a reason to frequent a website for something other than purchasing – meaning they’ll come with less hesitation. And once readers see your content is high quality, they’ll sometimes come back with referral traffic (friends, family, co-workers, etc. who they’ve shared your blog with).
Blogs build market influence
Blogs may be everywhere on the Internet, but high quality blog content isn’t.
Make sure your posts are always of the highest quality you can offer. Also, stay on top of trends and news in your market to make sure blog posts have different angles and are actually worth reading.
By doing so, readers see your blog as a constant, reliable source of interesting and useful information – thus building influence in your market. More traffic and more conversions are byproducts of being a thought leader in your niche.
Blogs sift out the most qualified leads
Considering that content is narrowly focused on a specific market, readers can usually discern whether or not your products/services are for them by just spending time on your blog.
The most qualified leads are the ones who choose to opt in to receiving your blog content via email… assuming you give them the opportunity to do so.
Blogs are another opportunity to encourage sales
Hiring a copywriter to write several different types of marketing and sales collateral runs the possibility of being costly, depending on your range of products/services and your market.
Eliminate some of the expense by creating blog content that doubles as sales collateral. Keeping your audience’s best interest in mind, you can slip in plugs to your products/services in blog content.
Just remember to keep the 80/20 rule in effect. 80% relevant, informative and useful content. 20% sales copy.
Blogging is more than a trend!
Blogging is more than just an Internet craze. It is a hardworking web marketing tool that can reduce costs and increase revenue when maintained properly. If you don’t have a company blog in place already, WordPress offers a user-friendly blogging platform. It’s a great starting point.
Whatever your preference, get started creating the best content to deliver to your audience today. And keep it up. Rome wasn’t built in a day!