10 Reasons Why Your Company Should Blog
Increases website views. People are always looking for information. That's why Google is the superpower that it is today. Providing useful information on a regular basis with a blog is an easy and inexpensive way to pique interest and bring traffic to your website. It also helps improve your search engine performance. One more blog post means one more page indexed on your website. That's one extra opportunity for your website to pop up in search engines. Once eyes turn to your blog, the likelihood of customers reading your main pages increases.
Establishes authority. If you offer valuable content that genuinely assists your customers for free, you're building trust and authority with your audience. Ideally, your blog will be a go-to source of information in your niche because people are looking to you for answers. People (emotional creatures) want to buy from brands they can trust.
A simple and timely way to communicate with customers. It's important that the content you produce is timely and relevant. The modern world requires brands to be immediately reactionary because the world moves quickly, and something new happens every minute. Your blog allows you to reach customers quickly in a way that whitepapers, ebooks, and infographics can't.
Builds a loyal community. For example, HubSpot. Do I really need to say more? HubSpot is the go-to company for a legion of marketing professionals because of the stellar advice they provide on their blog. If you have a question, they probably have an answer, and it's easily searchable and digestible. In return for their amazing blog, they have received an army of acolytes at every rung of the marketing ladder.
Gives your brand a voice. Let's experiment. Think of IBM, then think of HubSpot. Have you read their blogs? They each have a distinctive brand voice, and that shows up in their writing. It's like giving your company a human personality. Is your brand fun? Is it supportive? Is it professional? Informative? You can decide who your company is going to be when addressing your target market, which is another amazing way to reel your customers in.
Gives your sales team a backbone. That sounded mean. They have backbones, they just need support. With a blog, you can post a series of articles outlining the benefits of your product(s) that consumers can peruse in their own time. Your sales team can use that to stay at front and center in the minds of their leads.
Provides a hub for your content marketing efforts. You can make a blog post out of any marketing collateral, and you can create marketing collateral from blog posts. Have a whitepaper or an ebook? Recycle them into smaller, single posts that provide rich information. Use those blog posts to consistently offer valuable content on social media. Use comments and questions from your posts to create new content.
Better chance of converting leads. If you've recycled bits of your marketing collateral for blog posts, you can use those blog posts to upsell your meatier content. Use your blog posts as a hook and use your webinars, whitepapers, ebooks and tutorials to reel them in. Add a lead generating call-to-action at the end of your post to lead them to a page where they'll exchange their information for a greater learning opportunity such as a free trial or ebook.
Gives insight into your audience. You can stay in tune with the minds of your customers by maintaining a blog. By measuring which posts are performing well and what questions your audience is asking in the comments, you can adjust your strategies and continue to provide meaningful and informative content that is tailored to their needs. You can also (depending on the content and the product) get insight into your customers' feelings about your organization.
A voice for the whole team. Blogs are a great way to get perspectives from all over your organization. Get a perspective on company culture from HR. Get detailed product descriptions from sales. Get how-tos and tutorials from your support team. Bring your whole organization into the effort to create a rich and well-rounded blog that will offer true value to your audience.
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