Transport yourself back to the early 2000s. Picture this: You're wearing your cringiest Y2K fashion, scrolling through Myspace on your microwave-sized desktop computer as you stumble across your first-ever blog.
Chances are, when you first encountered a blog, it belonged to a friend of a friend – a place to share their internal monologue and write about their life. Early blogs were hosted on personal websites and filled with family recipes and holiday photos, something akin to an online diary.
Blogs of today are an entirely different beast
Nowadays, there are over 600 million blogs on the internet, and they’re used to share informative, helpful information that engages the reader – any reader, not just a close friend of the blogger. A blog is a powerful tool to implement within a digital marketing strategy, and developing a blog could be just what your business needs to reach your customers in a new way and make your mark.
Let’s dive into five of the most compelling benefits brought about by high-quality blogging for today’s small businesses.
1. Boost Brand Awareness
Your blog is an opportunity to showcase your brand’s personality and connect with your audience in a more meaningful way.
When a business solely focuses on sales tactics and strategy, it’s easy to come across as cold and unapproachable. Utilizing a blog to highlight your personal side – while delivering useful tips and information – helps you to build trust with your audience and show them that you’re more than just a sales machine.
Not only does a blog help to solidify your brand persona, but it also establishes your business as a thought leader and industry expert. Your blog allows you to demonstrate expertise within your niche, turning you into a power player in the eyes of your audience.
2. Generate Website Traffic
Developing a blog for your business should naturally cover topics that interest your target audience and are relevant to your business and industry. A blog is a useful vehicle that enables your business to continue developing fresh website content. It provides answers your audience is looking for while giving you a platform to dish out advice and promote relevant products and services.
Blogs are very effective when it comes to driving traffic to a website. Through regularly posting insightful, relevant content, businesses with blogs have been shown to receive 55% more website visitors than their blogless counterparts.
3. Improve Search Engine Optimization
We’ve talked before about search engine optimization (SEO) and its importance when growing a digital presence for your business. That’s why we’re so pleased to announce that a blog can be an extremely effective tactic for improving your SEO strategy!
Keywords are the foundation of any strong SEO strategy, and blogs present a fantastic opportunity to create content based on those keywords – especially those trickier-to-incorporate long-tail keywords.
Note: Long-tail keywords are search phrases composed of 3 or more keywords. They’re typically specific to your target audience and have less competition.
Let’s say you run a local bakery. While it’ll be extremely difficult to rank high in Google for a broad keyword like “croissant,” you’ll likely find better results with more specific long-tail keywords like “gluten-free artisan bread.”
Crafting an impactful SEO strategy all comes down to knowing and employing your keywords correctly.
The Brand Brew’s SEO Keyword Strategy and Report provides you with everything you need to implement the right keywords the right way across all of your digital content – blog included.
4. Fuel Social Media Content
Social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and all the most successful brands have cultivated a stellar social presence. Social media and blogging go hand-in-hand, lifting one another up and creating a positive snowball of engagement.
Once you’ve created a quality blog post, be sure to share it across your social channels. Your blog will gain traction thanks to your social media following, and the opposite is true, too – visitors who encounter your blog will be introduced to your brand. You can harness that exposure to promote your social profiles and your business as a whole.
If you’ve put in the work to develop a hard-hitting blog, you deserve to show it off! Promote your blogs on your social channels, and good things will follow.
5. Grow Your Mailing List
Did you know that 64% of small businesses engage in email marketing? That’s because email is a great way to interact with customers, develop trust, and promote special events. However, it can be tricky to grow that subscriber list.
That’s where your blog can save the day! Your blog acts as a sort of gateway for many potential customers, showcasing the quality of your content and introducing them to your brand. You can leverage your blog to entice people to subscribe to your email list to continue receiving valuable insights straight to their inbox.
For example...
Our blog, Behind the Brew, constantly comes out with fresh, piping-hot content to fill your cup. We blog about brand strategy, helpful tips and tricks, and everything the small business owner needs to know to kick their brand into high gear.
And – you guessed it – you can subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss a thing!