Blogging has been around for two decades now, and several our clients have asked if it is still an effective tool for marketing. After all, isn’t today all about social media, Instagram, and influencers?
While the marketing world has evolved, the importance of creating and executing a well-crafted blogging program remains paramount in the online marketing tool kit for most businesses. Here’s why:
Thought Leadership and Industry Presence - As a tool to both inform and educate readers (and potential clients!), a blog provides your businesses with an opportunity to separate yourself from the competition by demonstrating your knowledge of the industry. More importantly, blogs enable you to communicate key messages that not only demonstrate your knowledge and experience, but also resonate with other business owners and decisions makers. The opportunity to become a “go-to” source of information is a nice advantage to hold in positioning your firm or organization as an industry leader that knows their stuff.
Brand Reinforcement - While readers seek out blogs to get informed (and for entertainment), the copy heavy nature of blogging your brand(s) to be woven into the content. In addition, communicating as a thought leader, as discussed above, utilizing your own voice and style gives readers insight into your company culture. How you do things, what information you feel is important, and the fact that you wish to share key nuggets with your readers. By reinforcing your brand identity and culture, people can better associate their business needs and personal preferences with your company, leading to loyal blog readers who then become loyal clients. In this way, people identify with your brand and appreciate the knowledge you hold and provide. Suddenly, they have connected with your brand and identify your organization as a source for solutions – including the products and services you sell.
Get More Eyeballs and Clicks to your Website and other Platforms - A well-crafted blog provides readers with meaningful information. Information they can take back to their business or personal life. By becoming a trusted resource (the “thought leadership” discussed above), you build awareness not only of your brand, but of your blog series, in a manner that has people coming back for more. Once you have someone engaged reading your blog, it is far easier to get them to click to the rest of your website, or to check out your social platforms, and even buy goods and services for those of you that provide them directly to the customer.
Give People a Call to Action - The root of all blogs is to provide information that enables other businesses or consumers the ability to make better decisions. That decision may be to buy a certain product or service, or it may be to help them run their business (or personal life!) in a more constructive and meaningful way. This process can lead seamlessly into a reader recognizing they must “do something” – and that something could be buying a product that you sell or engaging your organization as a client. The ability to educate a consumer that something is valuable, and to connect the dots whereby they recognize that YOUR company is best suited to meet their needs is a wonderful way to build a customer base, and loyal followers who want to do business with you.
For these reasons (and many others!), blogs are an important and valuable tool in the marketing toolkit. Our recommendation is to not only provide information that resonates with the reader, but utilize messaging that fits into your overall marketing program as a critical cog in the marketing machine. It is the integration of blogging into the greater marketing strategy that sets apart those which have minimal input, and blogs that become magnets for readers – and new business.
