These days, blogs are much more than a way to disseminate information. Sure, they are a great tool for educating the public, but they can also serve other purposes within your company. Blogs can help build brand awareness, increase reach, improve SEO, acquire new leads and much more. Read on to learn how your company’s blog can be one of the handiest tools in your marketing toolbox.
#1: Boost Brand Identity
An important point to make here is that whether or not your audience chooses to read your blog, simply seeing that you are actively publishing original blog content and articles signals to them that you care about circulating educational content. It positions you as a thought leader in your area and proves that you are an organization with important information to share. This will build brand authority and increase your audience’s trust in you. The more consistently you post, the more your audience will view your company as a reliable source of timely information that they can turn to.
#2: Increase Exposure
Remember, blogs live on your site indefinitely, which means that they can continue to drive traffic and increase leads for days, months or even years into the future after publication. However, the blog doesn’t have to be the only spot where your content exists. Blog content can be repurposed across multiple channels. The post acts as an excuse to remind your audience of the blog’s content via email, social media or any other platform that your company uses. Your employees or colleagues can share these posts with their networks on multiple social media channels, increasing your reach tremendously with a simple click of the “Share” button. By finding new and creative ways to reinvent and share your messaging, you don’t have to dedicate as much time creating content, yet you still receive the exposure benefits.
#3: Drive Website Traffic
Sure, you may have a solid base of frequent website visitors, but how can you attract new visitors to your site? One perk of hosting a blog is that it helps you acquire new audiences that might not have visited your site otherwise. Each time you publish a blog post, your site adds another page. Why is this important? This is crucial because the more page volume your site has, the more indexed pages you have as well, which means that it is more likely you will show up on someone’s search engine results page and generate organic search traffic.
#4: Maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Backlinking
Frequently updating a website alerts search engines, such as Google, that your site is active and creating new content. This gives the search engine more of an incentive to index your website regularly. Also, the blog provides a great opportunity to fit in more long-tail keywords, which tend to be longer and more specific. Not only is it easier to rank for these longer keywords on a search engine results page, but it also increases the likelihood of conversions since the site visitor has a more specific agenda. Another added benefit of a blog is that it provides countless more opportunities for internal linking and backlinking – this boosts traffic and improves SEO tremendously. Adding your content to another website or blog can further expand your reach and audience, especially if that site is able to show up for different search terms than your website. Including graphs and images that have rich metadata descriptions is also crucial for SEO.
Beyond these four benefits, there are plenty of other ways that a blog can enhance your marketing strategy – the opportunities are endless! From attracting new leads to educating existing customers, a blog can support various aspects of your business. It is okay to start on a smaller scale, with one or two posts per month, but as you slowly work your way up to a more consistent blog schedule, you will see the benefits multiply.
