Why Every Business Needs A Successful Business Blog
These days every business not only needs a well optimized website but also a successful business blog. A business blog maximizes opportunities to interact and engage with prospects and customers in a meaningful way.
This means connecting with them in a manner that not only fulfills their needs but also provides that essential human interface. This user experience strategy builds trust and keeps those customers and prospects coming back for more.
That’s why personalizing your communications is the key to success in an increasingly sophisticated online marketplace.
A blog provides a central hub where the visitors to your website can peep behind the business curtain. Where they can connect with the people who are involved with it on a day-to-day basis.
Simply having a blog button on your site will prove irresistible. People have become used to this as a chance to discover more and stay up to date.
Done correctly, a successful business blog can:
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Act as a platform for news.
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Make announcements about your business.
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Answer the questions that most frequently arise.
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Prevent complaints by dealing effectively with those that may have arisen in the past.
It also serves as the spoke around which the wheel of your social media marketing revolves.
A business blog can be one of the most powerful branding tools of all, delivering the image and essence of your business that you want to convey to the wider world.
Here are just some of the big brands that use blogging as a powerful marketing tool:
Coca Cola: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/coca-cola-unbottled
Walmart: https://blog.walmart.com/
Disney: https://ohmy.disney.com/
Skype: https://blogs.skype.com/category/big-blog/
IBM (not just one but many excellent blogs): https://www.ibm.com/blogs/
Even better, many of these big brands also sponsor content on other blogs, especially those that reflect the right kind of lifestyle.
Some of the brands that pay big bucks to lifestyle blogs include:
Nordstrom
Target
Old Navy
Crate & Barrel
Coca Cola
There are also blogs built around a particular individual associated with a brand such as Sir Richard Branson and Virgin:
https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson
Or Bill Marriott and Marriott hotels:
https://www.blogs.marriott.com/
But it’s not only big brands and business owners who reap the rewards of running a blog. There are any number of small business owners, online and off, who are also profiting from this essential form of marketing and you can do the same.
If, for example, yours is a family business and your brand is built upon that then you have the perfect means of introducing those people who not only made up that family in the past but who continue to deliver a great service today.
Your prospects and customers are always interested to learn the history behind the company, to discover how it was built and its ethos and to therefore feel even more connected to that business. Connection leads to trust and it is trust these days that results in sales.
If your business is purely web-based, then a blog gives you the chance to connect in a way that previously was only open to bricks and mortar enterprises. With a blog you can reach out in a way that is the closest thing possible to face to face interaction. Simply share your thoughts and reflect your personality in your posts.
You will also be able to counteract the often-justifiable mistrust with which prospects treat information online.
An increasingly Internet-aware audience knows that the web is far too frequently used to sell, sell, sell. They are bombarded with adverts when carrying out searches, when surfing social media and even when checking their emails.
As mobile Internet usage overtakes PC usage, so the advertisement avalanche continues. A vast number of apps, particularly the free ones, display adverts and the average user will have to wade through all kinds of offers before they can even access the content they need.
If they find that content on your website, however, then, by providing a valuable, personal resource in the form of a blog, you are far more likely to retain that visitor who will come back time and again to read your updates.
This, of course, means that they will be exposed time and again to what you have to offer. Provided you present your offer with an intelligent, human touch and follow the other tips you will find here, it is highly likely that at some point they will choose you over your competition.
What Makes A Successful Business Blog?
How do you create this kind of content?
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Make sure your reader is engaged.
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Interact with your readers.
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Serve up the kind of material that fulfills their needs, answers their questions and incites their curiosity.
Of course, all that is easier said than done. Especially if you look on your blog as a necessary business evil. Rather than an exciting platform that can boost your profits as well as your brand.
The problem is that most business owners simply do not have time to keep their blog fresh and current.
Most blogs start off with the best of intentions but quickly fade into the occasional post, or nothing at all, which means that they are at best doing nothing for your business and at worst harming it. This is one of the biggest mistakes that beginner bloggers make.
A neglected blog that contains a few outdated posts conveys the wrong impression about your business.
It tells your visitors that you cannot be bothered to engage with them and/or that you are simply not interested in providing them with news and information that can actively help them towards their purchase decisions.
A blog that is kept up-to-date and relevant with exciting content, on the other hand, draws your visitor in to both your site and your business. It allows them to get to know you as a person and business owner as well as also enabling them to get to know your team if you have one.