No matter your industry, every small business should be online these days. It’s a competitive world out there and your competitors are likely already online and you don’t want to be left behind. But a website is not enough, a blog will help you grow your business and in this article I’ll give you 5 reasons why your business needs a blog on your website in 2016.
And I know that while you work hard on your business, it often seems like a hassle to have to put together content for a blog but as I’m about to share with you, it can be well worth the time and energy.
– Builds credibility for your brand. The first rule of online success is to focus on great quality content that solves your ideal customer’s problem(s). This is content marketing whereby you provide the content first and attract leads second. By constantly creating content and posting it on your blog you are positioning your brand as the leader in your industry. The more you post on your blog about solving problems that really resonates with your target market, the more credibility you build. This in turn leads to trust and keeps you top of mind.
– Shows that your brand is a leader. Together with building credibility for your brand, constantly posting to your blog shows that your brand is always up to date and a leader in the industry. Your target market will always come to you as the leader in your industry when it comes time to transact with your business in some way. This is in contrast to a website that has a blog that has been posted to in 6 months. How many times have you seen this and thought, I wander if they’re still in business? Whereas when a visitor comes to your website for the first time, if the see a recent blog post no longer then 7y days old it straight away shows them that your brand is active and ready to help them.
– Provides another communication channel. Business is really all about communication no matter your industry and these days there are multiple ways for your customers to interact with your brand. To stay on top of things, you need to be communicating across all different platforms. Social media in particular but also utilising a blog. A very effective way to communicate with your audience is to combine the two and send people to your blog via social media – more on that later. The more communication channels your business has, the more likely your ideal customer’s will be able to resonate with at least one of them.
– Helps with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around for years and when people think of online success they often think of appearing in top spot on the Google search engine rankings. Blogs have always been and continue to be a great source of keyword data for Google to identify and use in their analysis to rank your website. This is called indexing. Further to this, if you are constantly adding relevant content to your blog, then when Google crawls your site it will see that you have added new content and reward you for it with a higher ranking. Google also rewards your website for interaction, so a string of blog comments can also help boost your ranking. This in turn means that your target market will find your content sooner rather than later.
– To build your Facebook Website Custom Audience. This is a big one and if you ask me the biggest reason why your business needs a blog on your website. Love it or hate it, Facebook is the biggest platform in the world and your ideal customers are on there. Facebook allows you to collect data about people who visit your website and then you can market to them through their advertising platform. This is called remarking and is one of the most powerful forms of online advertising. Have you ever been shopping online and visited a website and the next time you log into Facebook, there are ads for that website are in your newsfeed? That is not by coincidence and the conversion rates on these ads are massively higher then targeting cold traffic on Facebook. You can read all about Facebook marketing in our blog category dedicated to the topic. When you have a blog, you can intentionally drive traffic to the blog post with great quality content with the specific purpose of building your website custom audience. This leads to increased awareness about your brand and an audience who is warmed up to your business offering and ultimately means more sales for your business.
So as you can see there are a number of reasons why taking the time to create a blog and post regularly will be of benefit to your business. If you have any questions at all please email me at tim@timlumsdendigital.com.
