Why Should Your Small Business Marketing Plan Include Blogging?
If your small business marketing plan doesn’t involve blogging, start right now.
The Marketing Benefits of Business Blogs
- Drive Traffic To Your Site
Who doesn’t want more website visitors?
Think about the ways people come across your website:
- They type your business’s name into their browser, but you already have that audience. They know who you are.
- You can pay for traffic by purchasing an email list and hoping a few people click through on the email.
- You could place loads of paid ads which gets pricey. Also, once you run out of budget, the traffic stops coming.
So how can your small business marketing strategy plan to drive traffic? Blogging. And search engines. And social media.
Think about the amount of pages on your website. Probably not many, right? Now think about how often you could update those pages. Not too often, correct?
The good news: blogging solves both those problems.
Every time you write a blog post, it’s another indexed page on your site. That means it’s one more chance to show up in the search engines and drive traffic to your site in an organic, relevant search.
What’s more, blogging is a great way to get discovered on social media. Every time you publish a post, you’re creating content for people to share in their networks and this helps expose your business to a whole new audience you may not have reached.
Blog posts help keep your social presence going, too. You can strengthen your social reach with your blog content and drive new website traffic to the blog via social media.
- Convert Traffic into Leads
Now you’ve got new traffic coming to the website thanks to your blog, you can convert traffic into leads.
Every blog post is a new opportunity to generate brand new leads. Simply add a lead-generating call to action at the end of each post.
- Establish Authority
The best small business marketing blogs answer common questions their customers and leads have. If you keep creating content that is helpful for your target audience, it will help establish you as an industry authority.
- Drive Long-Term Results
Can you just imagine if one of the following things helped drive traffic to your site and generate brand new leads:
- Sleeping
- Working out at the gym
- A holiday to Hawaii
Blogging actually does that, mainly through search engines.
Imagine you sit down for about an hour to type out and publish a blog post for the day. The blog post gets, let’s say, 100 views and 10 leads. Tomorrow you get another 50 views along with 5 leads as a few more people come across the post on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their RSS feeds and email. Then after a few days the fanfare dies down and you’ve hooked in 150 views and a total of 15 leads.
You’re not done!
The post is now ranking in the search engines. So for days, weeks, months and even years to come, you’ll continue getting traffic and leads from a single blog post. So while it feels like it should all be about one day, in reality, the effort you put in yesterday can lead to hundreds of thousands of views and even leads later on.
There’s another takeaway point here: the more evergreen blog posts you publish, the more likely it is you will land on compounding blog posts (those posts that continue to grow over time). Hubspot reports that 1 in every 10 blog posts actually land up being compounding blog posts.
Doesn’t this just demonstrate the scalability of blogging for your small business marketing plan? While it may take a while to see results, with time, you will be able to rely on predictable amounts of traffic and leads for your company without having to invest any additional resources. All the work is already done.
More Benefits of Business Blogging
There are a couple of other reasons businesses may want to blog. But those are a little smaller and tend to stray from blogging’s core benefits.
For example, blogs are great for helping you to understand your customer personas better. They’re also fantastic outlets through which marketers can communicate any important PR information they may need to get out there, like event information or product launches. It’s definitely a lot easier to get attention for your company-focused initiatives if you have already built up your own audience on your own blog as opposed to pitching a press release to various publications in the hope of one of them biting.
Does Your Small Business Marketing Plan Include Blogging?
These are some great side effects of business blogging. If you’re looking to start a business blog or even get more investment for one that you have started, the above reasons are a great starting blog for your case.
If you need help establishing your blog, book a free consult with Rosy Marketing today.