Why Legacy Businesses Need Blog Content On Their Website

By: Kathryn Roberts, Principal — Roberts Statistical & Consulting Services, Los Angeles

Does your website also act as a lead generator?

Because it should be one.

Even as a legacy business, your website should serve as your organization’s home on the Internet, the place where your potential customers can learn about you, learn about your history, your background, your leadership, and why your current and potential customers should choose you over your competition. Not only that, it should be one of the easiest ways for your potential customers to buy your top-line products, if your website is optimized for online purchases.

But many times, legacy business’ websites are just static pages that haven’t been touched much since they were created. They are just websites for the sake of having a website, because all your competitors have one. They are not optimized for the modern web, have the bare minimum or out of date information, and limited functionality.?

Oftentimes they’re also extremely impersonal, challenging to navigate, and the only option for someone to choose to work with you or to buy from you is to have that potential customer place a phone call with the sales department.

That doesn’t work on its own anymore.

Remember, your job is now to show up on the platform of your potential customer’s choice. You go to them, rather than waiting for them to come to you. Because if you wait, you’re going to be waiting forever, and that potential customer is going to become your competitor’s actual customer.

That’s why, at the bare minimum, your website should serve as that lead generator and sales arm for your organization.

Expanding your business’ marketing to more modern strategies can sound intimidating. There are so many options from the different types of ad platforms you can use to all of the different social media platforms available, but it doesn’t have to be everything everywhere, all at once. You can take it one strategy at a time, and if you decide to go on that route, starting with blog content is one of the most painless avenues you can take.

And as mentioned in our last marketing article, How Legacy Businesses Can Market Themselves In the 21st Century (Without Having To Get On TikTok) (Link Here), if you’re not comfortable with the idea of calling it ‘blog content’—as it will be referred to throughout the rest of this post—just think of it a press release.

Understanding How Internet Marketing & Search Engines Work

One critical factor to understand here is that when you decide to implement a blog content strategy to your business’ website, you’re playing a long game here.

Posting one or two blog posts to your website over a couple days isn’t going to lead to 100 new leads in two weeks.

It takes between 60 and 90 days at the earliest for search engines like Google to pick up on the fact that your website has blog content, let alone where to rank it amongst other similar topics online–also known as SEO strategy.?

That means that the sooner you get started, the sooner you start seeing the results you’re looking for.

But just know that it’s not going to happen in a week.

We’re focusing on the long game here, and it takes consistency to make your website a lead generating machine for your business. But when it does, and when you focus on the consistency of it, it will pay you dividends long into the future, giving you another arm that will feed into the overall longevity of your organization.

It’s The Easiest Way To Dip Your Toes Into Modern Marketing

Not ready to dive into the Gen-Z popularized social media platforms like TikTok? You don’t have to be.

Blog content is great, because you already have a website, all you need to do is add a menu that points people to your blog, and share content there on a regular basis.

Even one blog post per month (though weekly posts are ideal if you want to see results sooner) will help tell the search engines that your website is being updated. It shows that you want people to come to you, so those search engines will move you up the ranks and make it more likely for you to be found in a typical search, instead of just hoping that someone will come across your website and say yes to you.

It’s low risk and doesn’t take that much effort—even a post like this can be written in just a few hours, and has the opportunity to make a massive impact on your business and its longevity.

It’s Free Website Traffic

Who doesn’t love the word ‘free’?

One reason blog content is a great avenue for legacy businesses to add to their marketing strategy is that the traffic that comes to you doesn’t cost a penny.

Yes, there are marketing strategies that you can pay that are absolutely worth putting some of your marketing budget on, but also, free works too.

As mentioned in the Understanding How Internet Marketing & Search Engines Work section above, search engines like Google pick up on websites that are consistently creating and posting quality content, and share that content with people who are searching for specific topics.

For example, if someone searches for ‘best paper towel dispensers for schools’ on Google and you have a blog post on your website titled, “Top-5 Paper Towel Dispensers for Schools’, then Google is going to show that person your website.

And you didn’t have to pay a penny to get your business in front of that potential customer. It’s time well spent.

It’s Another Lead Generator

Once your potential clients land on your website from their search engine of choice, you get to tell your potential clients and customers exactly what to do from there.

When working with our clients on their marketing strategies, one of the first questions we ask at RobertsSCS is, “What do you want your potential client to do after they see your marketing content online?”

This question is important because you have to actually tell your potential customer to do that thing once they encounter your content.?

Going back to that example in the section above with the paper towel dispensers, you can’t just assume that once that potential customer sees your post, ‘Top-5 Paper Towel Dispensers for Schools’, that they’re going to start going shopping on your website for the dispensers that you market. Not unless you tell them explicitly, what they should do—also known as a call to action.

Every single piece of content you create for your marketing should have an explicit call to action. This could be leading someone to your website’s listing for that specific paper towel dispenser you’re promoting, or it could be telling that person to call the sales department for bulk sales of paper towel dispensers, or to leave an online message that someone in your sales department can call that potential client back with the information on bulk paper towel dispenser sales.

Or "D": all of the above.

This is also how you can get potential customers onto your email list, and how you get to continue to grow your network and your overall customer base.

It Allows You To Shows Off Organization’s Expertise In The Market

Creating blog content for your website is an opportunity for you to have a place on the internet where you show your potential customers that you know what you’re talking about.

That you’re the expert at what you do, how you navigate your industry, and what you sell.

But if you don’t go out and show people how you’re the expert, then they’re not just going to know.

Because your potential clients want to work with people who know what they’re talking about. The organizations who are going to put them on the shortest route from Point A—not having what they need, to Point B—getting the right product that they need at the right price and with the quickest delivery possible.

Blog content is the opportunity for you to not just speak on products you promote—which also opens you up to a great opportunity to connect with your vendors and negotiate with them on preferred products—but also for you to speak on current events, industry trends and challenges–like COVID-19 and the international supply chain blockages.

This puts you at the forefront of what’s going on in your industry not just locally, but also regionally and even nationally, which will lead to more customers and vendors desiring to work with you.

It’s Easy To Repurpose To Other Platforms

The key to marketing on the internet is to give you and your organization as little work as possible.?

That’s where repurposing comes in.

The content that you create for your website’s blog can be easily shared to platforms like LinkedIn, but also repurposed for other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

You can also speak on the content you share in live or recorded video on YouTube, or even on podcasts to market your business.

There are no limitations to what you can share, where you can share it, and in what medium you want to share it in. One piece of content, like your blog post, shared on Facebook and YouTube, triples your chances at being found online.

And the more you are able to share that content, to spread it across the Internet, the more likely you are to have your potential customers actually find you online.

Does your company need a business plan? Is your existing business plan due for a refresh? Has your company lost focus and you are looking to re-energize it? RobertsSCS is here to work with you to bring your business processes into focus. Call us today at (310) 972-8243 or reach out to us at [email protected]

About RobertsSCS:

Roberts Statistical & Consulting Services ─ RobertsSCS ─ offers results-oriented strategies, mentoring, and insights to optimize operations for legacy companies looking for 21st Century upgrades to improve profitability, increase sales growth, and future-proof systems for sustainability.

Using 30-plus years of operating and management experience, RobertsSCS works with businesses with $1-30 million in revenue to create better efficiency, synergy, and outreach.? We provide developmental, strategic, and executable plans of action at multiple levels: wholesale, retail, B2B, and B2C for organizations desiring to maximize industry market share.

Knowing the market environment and the status of each business we work with allows us to provide customized insights on growth and profit opportunities at the local, regional, and/or national market level.