Top 5 Reasons Your Business Needs A Blog

Did you know that blogs are a very important and vital part of your content strategy in 2021? They position your business as content leaders and help you build a relationship with your customers.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy to create valuable content that helps you engage with your audience, build relationships and drive actions. These actions can be a phone call, the sale of a product or filling out a form.

While traditional marketing has a strong focus on describing product features, content marketing is all about providing value. I'll give you an example...

Let's say you have a company and you sell cameras.

A traditional marketing approach would be something like "Hey customer, I have a camera with 10 megapixels. Wanna buy it?"

Whereas a content marketing approach would be something like "Hey customer, here are 5 tips to help you take photos at night. By the way, I have a camera that is just perfect for that and probably something you'd be interested in right?

Do you see the difference?

Effective content marketing ties content to your brand. You can't just talk about anything, you have to pick a topic that is both related to your business and valuable to your customers.

How Do You Know If Your Topic Is Valuable To Your Customers?

You need to understand your audience. What are they looking for? What do they need to know? What are their pain points? Once you nail all of these questions and provide valuable content, you'll start to convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.

In summary, the key principles of content marketing include:

• Selling products vs providing value
• Ties content to your brand
• Know and understand your audience
• Convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers

Benefits Of Content Marketing

Now here are some benefits of content marketing:

• Improve brand awareness
• Build authority and trust
• Foster stronger customer relationships
• Provide value to your customers
• Generate traffic to your website
• Generate more qualified leads

When you put your valuable content out there, you're improving your brand awareness because people can share it and amplify your digital presence. By providing valuable content to your customers, you automatically build authority and trust. People will see you as an expert in your industry, which also helps you form stronger customer relationships.

And...

You know who else loves great content? Google! That's why content marketing can help you improve your SEO, generate more traffic to your website and generate more qualified leads.

Types Of Content Marketing?

There are many types of content you can include in your content marketing strategy. Something really cool about content marketing is that you can repurpose content in different formats, which helps you save time and money. You already have the information, you just have to present it in a different way.

Some different types of content marketing would include:

• Blog: blogs are not expensive and can increase brand awareness for your business
• Case Study: illustrate some of the successful results you've achieved for your customers
• Infographic: combine stats with eye-catching visuals to deliver valuable information
• Social Media: promote your business on Facebook, Instagram and other social sites
• Video: videos can be a bit expensive, but they are very powerful and produce strong ROI's

The Power Of Blogs For Businesses

First, here are some stats:

• Content marketing gets 3x more leads than paid search advertising
• 66% of marketers use a blog in their social media content
• 42% of B2C marketers outsource content creation

Now, let's talk about the top reasons your business needs a blog:

1. Improve Your SEO

Everyone knows that it's important to rank well on Google and other search engines, but most small business owners don't realize that improve their search ranking is as easy as blogging!

If you're unsure of what to write about, the best way to choose a topic is to identify where you're missing content for certain areas of business. If you're hoping to rank well for a certain keyword, like general contracting, for example, consider topics that feature that kind of phrasing.

2. Convert Website Traffic Into Leads

Every single new piece of content you put out into the world is one new opportunity to bring in leads. The key, however, is to ensure you have a call-to-action that will generate the leads. For example, "Book Consultation", "Free Quote" or even "If you're interested in this service, give us a call and enjoy 25% off until end of month.

3. Establish Yourself As An Industry Expert

If you're operating a successful business, it's because you know what your are doing right. You've worked hard to become an industry or subject matter expert in order to be the best at what you do in your area.

Blogs are a great opportunity to showcase all of your expertise and establish yourself as an industry expert. You can even incorporate a bit of your personal opinion into your blogs if you feel confident enough to do so.

4. Give People Content To Share

When it comes to blogs, you want to get your content in from of as many people as possible. Now, unless you have plenty of time to email, DM and text your blog link to everyone you know and their dog, you need to make that content SO good that the readers that stumble across it - or the one you sent to it directly - are compelled to share it with others.

5. Provide Content For Your Social Media

Engaging content is at the heart of your business' social media presence. No one wants to follow a company page that consistently tells you about their updated hours or current sales. That contents gets very dry and very boring quickly... BUT if you have interesting content that you hope is share-worthy, you should publish it on your business' social media profiles.