Blogs have evolved over the years as new platforms launch and the complexity of online content continues to develop. These days, most brands and businesses will be using a blog as a way of communicating to their customers, as well as highlighting the products and services that they offer. They may also write blogs on certain relevant topics in their industry, to give confidence to their customers by demonstrating their wealth of relevant experience and knowledge.
The format of blogs can vary; from large plain text articles to colourful, interactive, and stylish pieces of content. The sheer amount of creativity that blogs allow for, as well as the information that can be communicated to readers, ensures that blogs continue to be an internet staple for a whole manner of purposes. Therefore blogging can be incredibly useful for any size business, yet not all have one. Here we’ll discuss 3 reasons a company blog might be exactly what’s required to grow your business.
Building your brand
A company blog gives you a platform to announce your brand, your values and the benefits that you can give to your customers. It allows you to build your brand image in a sincere and honest way. Essentially, your blog is your personality and allows readers to understand more about your business. Depending on your brand, your blog may be written in a friendly, light-hearted manner, or perhaps a more formal and professional tone of voice is used. Neither of these are incorrect, it’s all about what suits your brand.
Blogging can be an important component of your marketing strategy; an example of building awareness may be identifying a current topic that has significant implications within your industry, and writing a blog about it. Sharing your thoughts on these topics can help people discover your company and become mindful of your brand. As well as the text itself, the visual design of your company blog is highly important. Posting blogs within a set schedule, whether it’s weekly or monthly, and using consistent design elements to match your company image will further help build your brand.
Driving traffic to your website
Blogs and inbound marketing go hand-in-hand. Creating consistent, valuable content will help you rank better in search engines and drive traffic to your website. Many blog and website builders now contain plug-ins, for example Yoast in WordPress, which will scan your blog article and provide tips on how to improve it from an SEO perspective. These plug-ins will identify keywords, phrasing, text length, links, and more which all help search engines determine your ranking authority. A company blog that is optimised, updated consistently, and relevant to a specific topic or target audience, can be highly successful at increasing the volume of traffic to your website.
However, it isn’t quite as simple as writing lots of blog posts and uploading them to your website. In order to ensure your blog ranks well, time should be spent carefully researching your target audience and suitable keywords. The target audience will most likely have been previously identified when planning your business strategy. If not, or a specific target audience is required for a single blog post, you can conduct market research, create personas, and analyse competitors.
Keyword research can be done using free tools or paid ones such as Semrush, which allow you to view keywords relating to your blog topic, and determine which are best to use in regards to their competition, click potential and monthly search volumes. As with any aspect of business, planning is important for success and it’s no different for company blogs.
Communication
Blogs don’t have to be one way communication from you to the reader. They can help encourage conversation with customers, by discussing interesting topics in an engaging way. Including links to social media, contact details, or even a comment section are all ways of giving readers a channel to reach you and converse. By talking to readers and building relationships, it helps solidify your brand and trustworthiness as a business.
Readers from any stage of the consumer journey can benefit from a blog that encourages them to get in contact, whether it’s simply awareness and answering prompts within the blog on social media or aiming to convert readers using a specific CTA.
Another great benefit of company blogs in relation to communication is the ability to essentially use it as a form of answering FAQs. If you identify certain questions that customers are asking, you can use a blog to talk about these topics thereby answering the questions.
Whilst we’re not recommending replacing an FAQ page with a blog, having both alongside each other and providing more detailed answers in the form of a blog post can be beneficial to customers. A lot of the time, readers and potential customers may not feel inclined to ask questions in case of them getting trapped in an arduous sales pitch.
Therefore having blog posts available for people to find out more about your products or services and have their questions answered can help them continue through the research stage of their consumer journey.
Conclusion
A company blog needs to be consistent in terms of its design, tone of voice, quality and release schedule. They can be vital for building a trustworthy, memorable brand. In 2020, 68.52% of surveyed bloggers agreed that blogs help add credibility to a website.
If you find there isn’t enough time to write high quality blog content, then there are options to outsource to companies like ours. The most important point to highlight is that consistency and quality will determine the success of your company blog. Essentially, you’ll only get out what you put in.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing. Whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
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