Do Local Businesses Stand to Gain Anything When They Start Blogging?

This is a guest post written by Junie Rutkevich.

The short answer is yes, they do!

Blogging is just a modern term that we’ve given to the decades-old art of content marketing. Businesses – big or small – have used content marketing to get their message across and attract more customers for a really long time.

Even blogging has existed for a long time now, serving as a content distribution medium. We can confidently say that blogging carries huge benefits for local and small businesses. In this post we’ll be discussing why you should start a blog for your business, and some tips to take it to the next level.

Cost Effective Inbound Marketing

Blogging can be used as a very effective inbound marketing tactic. Instead of spending incessantly on Facebook or Google ads, take some time to devise a content marketing strategy. Try to think of the message your business wants to give out to potential customers.

For example, if you’re a business selling Android app development services, it makes sense to have a blog dedicated to mobile apps and their development. Blogging and content marketing is a natural way to attain and retain customers by providing them relevant and valuable information that will influence their spending decisions. By explaining different topics in a non-salesy way, you form a bond with the customer. They don’t just view you as a company asking for money, but a company with views and real value.

We’re not suggesting that online advertising should be totally ignored in favor of blogging. The scope of online ads is huge, but blogging carries its own significance and huge benefits for businesses big or small. Compared to online ads, blogging is hugely cost-effective and has long-term benefits. Each year, the costs for Facebook Ads keep increasing making it an expensive option.

Your blog on the other hand, gets better as time passes. The older your content is, the better its chances of it appearing in the Google SERPs. That’s not to say that only age matters, you need to focus on SEO, content quality and many other factors to make your blog truly stand out. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Why Every Business Should Have a Blog

If you’re still not convinced to the value proposition of blogging, we’ve got much more to convince you. Let’s start with some hard numbers.

43% of business owners don’t have a clue about blogging, or don’t have an active business blog. Of course these businesses are missing out on more customers and leads, but this is also your chance to get the edge over your competition.

Chances are, some of your competitors aren’t using blogging as a marketing tactic. You can adopt this strategy to get ahead. That’s because 55% of business owners who do use blogging, use it as their number one inbound marketing strategy and say they have benefited from it.

Many companies have adopted a new strategy where people come to them for information on their business domain, rather than pushing sales via outbound strategies. How successful is this strategy? Well, let’s look at some numbers:

• 800% traffic for businesses that publish regular content
• 60% lower marketing spend due to blogging
• 3x more leads for businesses with active blogs

If these numbers still aren’t enough to convince you, we still have many more reasons that might.

Source: https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/benefits-of-blogging/

A Blog Can Help You Establish Authority

Blogging is a great way for businesses to show that they’re an authority on their subject matter knowledge. Businesses that share their knowledge and experience with the audience come off as more authentic as well.

Successful companies are known to publish blog articles to assert authority as a leader in the industry. And you ever have to hire a digital marketing agency to do the heavy lifting for you, pick the one that uses this method. You’ll be surprised as to how many marketing companies out there don’t believe the power of content and blogging.

This helps businesses build trust with customers. So first you build trust with customers, and then you try to sell them products/services, rather than the other way round.

An Opportunity to Create Value for Your Customers

People like to follow brands that tell stories that are a reflection of the customer’s life mission. What people don’t follow are brands that publish sales offers over and over. What do they stand to gain from sales posts?

But even for brands that create great blog posts for their customers, they have to think about adding value so that the customer experience is elevated. Companies need to realize that with blogging, they’re providing something for free in the hopes that the customer will make a purchase from them in the future.

So how do businesses create value from blogging? For a business in the food industry, this could be sharing recipes. For a business that sells smartphones, this could be sharing a list of the best productivity apps, and so on. These are mere freebies for people, but they might just like them enough to become your loyal customers.

An Active Blog Improves Your Business Site’s SEO

Having an active blog that publishes high quality content can do wonders for your site’s SEO. One way that blogging helps SEO is by increasing the number of indexed pages on your website. In fact, Demand Metric says that blogging is responsible for increasing a site’s indexed by pages by almost 434%.

And it’s easy to understand why. When you regularly post quality content to your blog, the search engine crawlers see this new content and index it. The crawlers also look for keywords so this content can be searched for through search engines. The more keywords they find, the better. This is why it’s a good idea to create content that includes keywords relevant to your business.

Final Thoughts – Improve Your Business with Blog Posts

Having an active blog not only gives your website SEO a boost, but it also makes your business stand out. 86% of visitors on a company website want information about products or services. And a blog can become an excellent method of dispensing this information.

A blog post offers you a unique way of positioning yourself and your services. It can help you reflect on your company’s purpose and its values. The blogs should be focused on creating a connection between the reader and the business.

A blog post can be written to directly address a common problem potential clients may be facing. By explaining solutions to the problem, potential clients might find your company to be more competent or trustworthy compared against the competition.

So if you haven’t already, start a company blog. It’s not hard and holds many, many advantages.

Author Bio

Junie Rutkevich is an Internet Media Influencer and working part-time as an SEO Expert in Logic Inbound Tyler team. She has been working as an SEO Expert for more than 10 years, helping local businesses scale up their clientele. Aside from work, she loves spending time feeding the stray dogs in her local shelter.