Top 5 reasons why your business needs a blog

Unfortunately though, blogs are all-to-frequently overlooked by business owners for videos, podcasts or whatever the trend of the time might be (pop-up ads on your website were never a good idea in our opinion).

The truth is that blogs are one of the most versatile and cost-effective ways to help you drive more sales, regardless of what business you have and what industry you’re in.

Here are the top 5 reasons why your business needs a top-quality blog right now.

1. So more people find your business

The main reason to create a blog for your business is to help drive new customers to your website.

Publishing blogs on your website will help improve your SEO score with Google. That means when people search for similar keywords that are featured in your blog on your website, your website is more likely to rank higher in their search results.

Subsequently, more people are likely to click through to your website, read your blog and become familiar with your business.

2. To grow your sales funnel

Your blog for your business should be authentic and offer value to the reader. It’s not a place to be shamelessly promoting your products and services.

However, it’s perfectly fine to include relevant calls to action to help prompt your audience to subscribe to your email list, request a free consultation or start a free trial.

Make sure to include at least one call to action on each of your blog articles so your audience has the option of engaging with your brand more if they’re interested.

3. To create a bank of content for your social media channels

In the introduction to this article, we mentioned that blogs were extremely versatile – here’s why.

If you’ve got a social media account for your business then you’ll understand how time consuming it can be to post good-quality content on a regular basis. (Sidenote: businesses don’t need to have an account on every social media platform but you should be active on at least one channel that best suits your business).

With a bank of quality blog articles on your website, you’ll never be stuck for content for your social media feed – you can publish your blog articles straight to your social media channels.

You can also publish the same blog on the same channel (such as Facebook) several times in the space of a year. The trick is to use different photos and copy in your post each time you publish the blogs.

Different photos and different copy will appeal to different people, so it’s a great way to see what type of photos and copy work best to make your followers click through to your website.

4. To fill your company’s digital newsletter

A regular digital newsletter to your client base is a great way to keep your brand top of mind and nurture your leads.

As well as using blogs on your social channels, they are also perfect to use in your digital newsletter (we told you blogs were super versatile).

“But won’t the blog articles date?” I hear you say. They might, but you can create blog articles for your audience that are timeless. Just think of the most common questions your customers always ask.

For example, for a real estate agent this may be around settlement periods, so you could create a blog article, ‘5 top tips for a smooth settlement when you sell your home’. For a home builder it might be information about the building process, so you could create a blog article, ‘Key milestones you need to know when building’.

You don’t want to include the same blog articles in every newsletter but if you’re sending a monthly newsletter then there’s no harm in repeating the same blog after 6-12 months.

5. To build credibility for your brand

You can use blog articles to position your brand as a thought leader or expert, and help build your company’s credibility and authority within its respective field.

If you own a landscaping business, create a blog about the latest pool and garden trends for 2021. If you own a mortgage broking business, create a blog explaining what regulatory changes mean for your customers.

By sharing your expert knowledge, readers will see you as a credible source of information which builds trust in your brand and helps convert customers at their time of purchase.

In summary, blog articles are the foundations of any digital marketing strategy for small and medium sized business.

They’re extremely cost effective, the information can remain relevant for a long time (and when they do date they can be easily refreshed), and most importantly they are extremely versatile so they can feed into many of your digital marketing channels.