Nine reasons why your business should be blogging

Blogs have been a recognised marketing tool for a number of years now and I’d argue they are the most powerful way of promoting your business today.

They’re also a hugely cost effective way for generating new business and raising awareness of your expertise or offer.

Despite this, many businesses still aren’t making use of blogs and the majority of those that do create blogs don’t make the full use of their potential and simply make a half-hearted attempt at writing something because everyone else is.

We’ve written at length about what a good blog should include but here I thought I’d share some of the most important reasons why your business should be blogging.

1. Get more exposure for your brand

A good quality blog quickly becomes a trusted resource for insights, opinions and tips and will be linked to by other businesses, shared across social media and referred to by industry commentators. The result of all this interaction is that your brand is put in front of a wider, more diverse global audience.

2. Get found by Google

By delivering regularly updated content that includes keywords around your product and service and also answers customer questions, Google will recognise you as a trusted resource for search results. Google loves quality content and the recent updates to its search algorithms have made blogs even more important. Put simply, blogs will get you to the top of Google searches and that means more customers will see you.

3. Attract more visitors to your website

By generating better search results and delivering interesting content that is shared on social media, you will start to pull in more visitors to the website. By linking key elements of content to critical areas of your site and including calls to action, you will soon ensure visitors are driven to the information that will trigger a buy.

4. Create quality business leads

By using your blog to write around the issues you can help solve for customers, you clearly position your company and the result is that you attract the exact type of potential customers you want. These are qualified and high quality leads that are quicker wins as they already know you can deliver what they need.

5. Build and maintain relationships

Blogs are a great way of keeping in touch with business contacts and reminding them about your expertise and are particularly useful for following up with new contacts and cementing those fledgling relationships. We often use blogs to help add more information following meetings. If a customer has a particular issue or is interested in a new service, we’ll send a blog to further the discussion. By including them in a monthly newsletter, you also nurture your existing network by sharing useful insights.

6. Win more business

The result of increased traffic to your website, stronger business relationships and a raft of high quality business leads is ultimately more sales. Here at Northern Lights, our blog accounts for around half of all new business enquiries because we’re getting found for our expertise.

7. Educate people about your offer

Many businesses often have complex products or services that can be hard to communicate with potential customers. Blogs are a great way to help people understand your offer. By breaking down your products or services into bite-size chunks and showing how you can help solve their individual issues, it expertly demonstrates exactly what you do.

8. Get feedback from the market

Getting honest opinions and clear insights into the shifting appetites of customers can be difficult for any business. By using blogs to provoke debate and encourage comments or responses, you can get a very clear understanding of what is concerning your customers and how you can respond to meet their needs.

9. Demonstrate your expertise, experience and thought leadership

Perhaps the biggest benefit of a blog is its ability to show the world why you are the best at what you do. By being generous with your insights, experiences and opinions you can position yourself as a thought leader and key opinion former in your sector. Not only will this help raise the profile of the business, but it will also generate a wealth of new business by clearly showing why potential customers should turn to you for help.

Blogs are constantly increasing in importance and we’re seeing a huge uptake among businesses that recognise their potential for generating new business.

Hopefully this will have demonstrated to you why every business should be blogging, but if you have any further doubts, let me know and I’ll do my best to resolve them.