By Maureen “Mo” Elinzano
When you think of blogs, you think of outfits of the day (#OOTD) and street style looks from fashion blogs, recipes for the best chocolate chip cookies like ever from mommy blogs or the latest photos from a world traveler’s trip to the Himalayas on a travel blog.
However– blogs can benefit your business, too, and it can be utilized as an excellent social marketing tool. From brand awareness to building loyalty to bringing in customers, blogs can have an immense impact on the success of your business.
Blogging is more than what to wear and selfies with the Eiffel Tower; here are the 5 “B” benefits of blogging for your business.
1. Brand awareness
Brand awareness is very important to any business. Traffic coming to your company website through a blog establishes your brand to the customer and what your business is all about. It allows your brand’s voice and personality to shine through by discussing your products or services, commenting on market trends, and stating your company’s initiatives and goals.
2. Brings in leads and customers
Bring in customers through the blog by converting traffic from the website into leads. Companies have call-to-action buttons on websites that are usually attached to a free demo, trial or offer and landing pages where people can fill out information. Having a blog can bring people into the website in order to find out about the company, sign up, get a free offer, and there you have it, a lead. According to a HubSpot survey, 60 percent of businesses who blog acquire more customers.
3. Builds loyalty
Building loyalty to your business through a blog means creating a two-way conversation with past, present and future customers. It’s all about interaction, feedback, comments, suggestions, testimonials and easy sharing, customers can easily share your posts with others and on social media. Getting to know your audience is imperative to building loyalty as well, and doing that through Q&As, link building, wordtracking and Google AdWords, etc. can strengthen that bridge of loyalty between the business and your customers (good thing bridge starts with a “B”).
4. Being trusted as an expert
Subject-specific blogs, like fashion or D-I-Y blogs, for instance, have the ability to demonstrate a person or group’s expertise in a certain subject or area and that can translate to business as well. Writing blog posts that will show how much knowledge that you have about a subject will establish you as an authority in that subject. This, coupled with doing other things, like answering customers, questions via Facebook or Twitter, is powerful and can potentially bring in leads.
5. Best form of PR and marketing
Blogs are the best form of PR and free press because if a company’s blog is very knowledgeable in an area, then journalists will interview that company’s bloggers as experts in that industry. Blogs are the best form of marketing because they’re inexpensive and are the lifeline of your content marketing efforts. This is because blog posts can be shared on various social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. They can also be shared on email newsletters and emails in general.
There you have it, the benefits to blogging for your business. Isn’t it beautiful? Okay, enough of the use of the letter “B!” Overall, with everyone connected online via social media and blogs and easily able to access them through their smartphones, tablets and computers, blogs aren’t just the now and future of online journalism, they’re the now and future of business too.