By Steve Lazuka, Zerys for Agencies
A blog can attract visitors to your website, generate leads and help you guide those leads to the point of purchase. Blogging is particularly valuable for small businesses because it helps level the playing field with larger competitors. Better yet, it helps establish your company’s persona. And as Thomas Petty likes to say, “people buy into you before they buy from you.”
Business blogging works. Hubspot notes 66% of companies that post monthly have acquired a new customer via their blog, and even 43% who post less frequently have met with success. 25% of companies that maintain a blog say it’s “critical” to their business, and another 56% say it’s important or useful – that’s 81% altogether. 67% of companies attribute an increase in leads per month to active blogging.
Business blogging is an effective marketing tool because it:
- Gives you a voice. It can be just-the-facts, funny or slightly irreverent or informal as long as it’s in keeping with your product type and audience. It should always be conversational because you’re speaking directly to the reader, whether B2B or B2C. It’s your chance to show you understand their needs and concerns. And, you know sales success depends on meeting people’s needs.
- Helps you get found, by expanding your online presence and establishing more, higher quality inbound links. This improves your website SEO and traffic.
- Introduces you to prospects you’d never encounter otherwise.
- Helps increase your email list for future contacts.
- Enables you to expand upon subjects of importance, whereas social media such as Facebook, even LinkedIn and especially Twitter only let you share snippets – a quick thought, photo or link.
- Reinforces branding and builds reputation by building credibility and trust – as long as you’re always honest and accurate. If you’re a sole proprietor or provide professional services such as an attorney or dentist, it’s important to brand yourself as well as your practice because people frequently choose the person, not the firm. That makes it more important than ever to demonstrate knowledge, expertise and approachableness.
- Distinguishes you from the competition, whether you operate in a fiercely competitive environment where others are also blogging or you’re the industry trend-setter. And by the way, prospects and customers really like to know you’re in the forefront, not just some “runner-up” company.
With a business blog, you can express your corporate point of view on trends or issues relevant to your products or services, industry or community. You can introduce staff or new products and relate stories about customers and how they’re using your products. You can expand on testimonials and also collect them through positive comments.
In fact, just giving people the option to comment on your blog articles shows you’re interested in feedback – that all-important two-way conversation that builds rapport with prospects. Positive comments reinforce your standing with readers. You can use them as testimonials for other promotional purposes or even topics for follow-up blog articles.
Still on the fence?
No matter how esoteric your products or narrow your niche, you have an audience or you wouldn’t be in business. They’re anxious to hear from you. Look at it this way: if blogging were purely a waste of time, why would millions of businesses consider it such a key component of their marketing strategies?
I’ll leave you with some inspiration — five real-world examples of small businesses you can actually relate to who are using their company blog in creative and highly successful ways. If they can do it – and do it well – so can you.
Steve Lazuka is the founder of Interact Media, creators of the Zerys Content Marketplace and Zerys for Agencies content marketing platforms. Follow Steve @SteveLazuka
About Zerys
Zerys is a powerful content project management tool and writer marketplace that makes it simple to manage any content project from start (strategy planning) to finish (auto-publishing). Zerys for Agenciesis a custom, private-labeled solution that allows agencies to manage all their clients’ content projects from one, simple dashboard. Zerys was founded in 2008, and is now used by thousands of businesses and hundreds of marketing agencies.
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