Blogs aren’t just for the average consumer that have something to say about food, fashion, fitness or technology. Blogs are for everybody, and especially for businesses. But you might ask yourself, why should my brand/business have a blog? Here are a few reasons:
- 60% of businesses who blog acquire more customers (2015 HubSpot survey result)
- 81% of US online consumers trust information and advice from blogs (BlogHer)
- Once you write 21-54 blog posts, blog traffic generation increases by up to 30% (TrafficGenerationCafe)
- Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small business that do not blog (ThinkCreative)
But what do we have to write about?
A brand blog is basically brand journalism. It’s a version of internally controlled public relations… let’s re-phrase that, internally controlled and free public relations. It can be difficult to create newsworthy content for traditional media outlets and even when you do, there is no guarantee of coverage. However, with a blog, you are the editor and the publisher, and you can control what is and isn’t news. Here are just a few of the reasons why we believe your brand should have a blog:
- Tell Your Story: The Internet of Things (IOT) is cluttered with products, information and distractions. Which means you have to work even harder to tell your story and connect with your audience so they know who you are in the digital world. You already work hard to establish your brand on packaging, on signage, in advertisements and more – so why not continue that message through a blog and not let your other efforts go to waste?
- Create A Personal Voice: The personal voice of a company or brand is its culture. It’s not just the words, it’s the emotion that sets the tone with your audience and helps them see you as the real people that they want to connect with, and be friends with, and ultimately buy products or services from. Are you funny, are you serious, are you witty? You decide.
- Fuel Your SEO: The IOT loves content, especially content that is updated frequently. Which is where blogs play perfectly since they’re full of rich content and keywords, and are constantly being updated. And the more content your website has, the more fuel for the search engines and the higher your website may rank.
- Drive Website Impressions: Unless you offer an online store, your website without a blog is static and often unchanging. Websites that remain static typically don’t generate repeat visitors since there’s nothing new for them to view. Publishing regularly on a blog helps keep your website fresh and new, and gives visitors a reason to return. (hint, increasing impressions and generating repeat traffic also helps fuel your SEO). [Tweet “Publishing regularly on a blog keeps your website fresh and gives visitors a reason to return. #FullTiltMarketing”]
- Showcase Your Products, Skills, Authority: On your blog, you make the news, you tell the story, you’re in control. You can talk about your products, discuss current events and how they relate to your business, showcase your skills and how you think, or show your visitors who you are as a company.
- Networking: Blogs can be a two-way conversation. They provide opportunities for others to comment and join in on the conversation. Your posts can also be shared in groups and on social media for additional chances to create a dialogue between you and your audience, and even between other companies in your trade, as well as synergistic products.
- Forces You to Market Timely: Yes, blogs happen in real time. Sometimes posts will be published via planned editorial, but you’ll also need to plan on including conscious stream of thought posts based on current events. You will need to stay actively engagement in your content and brand strategy to create relevant content for your audience.
- Source of Social Media Content: Finding things to post on social media is easy if you are a consumer – you can share the latest cat video or pictures of your kids baseball game, no problem. Posting things on social media as a business or a brand is a more active than passive process that requires good content and clear strategy. (This is where it’s important to know who you are, what you stand for and understand your brand voice in advance.) When you are cultivating brand content for your blog you become a news publisher and you make the news, giving yourself a ready stream of content that’s perfect for your social media platforms.
- Engages Your Employees: Many roles in an organization are singular and require a specific skillset. For blogging, you can engage multiple employees from multiple disciplines within your organization. This kind of engagement creates community within your business and helps showcase the real people that make up your business. Not to mention, your employees are your best brand advocates.
- Is a Source of Inspiration: Your blog requires content and that content needs to come from somewhere. So where does it actually come from? Everywhere. The beauty of blogging is it forces you to actively engage with consumers, the environment, technical disciplines, new trend data, pop culture and more to find meaningful, relevant and current content.
- Insights About Your Audience: Blog analytics, much like social media analytics, gives you valuable insight about your audience and what they like. What type of content do the respond to most? What posts are they reading more of and spending longer amounts of time on? Which topics get the most engagement? What days and times do you get higher traffic? All these details help give you a small window into just who your audience is, and what they like and what they are looking for in a brand allowing you to make real time changes.
- Shelf Life: Unlike a great social media post, or press release, blog posts can basically exist for as long as you continue to have the website live. Consider blog posts to be mini-webpages. Even after you’ve published a post, you can continually re-post it, mention it on social media, refer to it in other blog posts (hint: keep your website visitors on your site longer and decrease your bounce rate by doing this) or re-purpose its content under new light or with new data.
Public relations comes in a variety of forms and the power of brand journalism through blogging should not be overlooked.
Not sure how to get a blog started? Struggling with generating regular and relevant content? Drop us an email, we’d love to chat all things blogs.
Written by Melinda Goodman & Alison Eiler
