The Bottom-line Reason You Need A Blog

 

Q: What’s the point of blogging? Nobody reads mine anyway.

A: No, no, no, no, no! There is a point to blogging! If you find yourself asking this, chances are there are a few things you’re forgetting to do — mainly sharing it and making it shareable.

But fear not, we can explain why you should be blogging and how you can do better if you’re not currently seeing good results.

Why is blogging important? It creates thought leadership, brand awareness

The Return on Investment (ROI) of social media and blogging is something often not tangibly measured.  However, it develops thought leadership and brand awareness for your company.

What does this mean? It means that people will be looking to you when they need information, advice, or news related to your specific industry. Consequently, the experts are whom people will probably go to when they need to make an industry-specific purchase.

Your goal in creating thought leadership should be for consumers in your industry to check your blog or website first, rather than going to Google.

Everybody’s doing it

Even for small businesses, blogging to create thought leadership is something most companies do.

According to Forbes, 60 percent of businesses are practicing some form of inbound marketing. If you’re not — particularly when you have an industry-specific expertise to offer — you may be left behind.

Digital consumption is pretty much ubiquitous. From researching products and services to reviewing the consumer experience, today’s consumer wants information and products to be available at the touch of a button. And if you don’t shape your image online, they will for you. Blogging is a good way to have a say in your online presence.

It should be part of your marketing strategy — so find your voice 

Blogging must correspond with — and be part of — your marketing strategy. In our previous blog post, we mentioned that digital marketing must be strategized. Because social media is becoming increasingly content driven. If you have links only to industry related news from other sources, consumers won’t be going to your website.

Blogging can fix that. That’s why you must share your blog posts as well as make them shareable.

A crash course in how to make your blogs more sharable

If you have a marketing strategy, you should have a brand. That brand should be translated through your blog posts.

So, what’s your voice? Is it quirky? Is it conversational? Is it humorous? Is it polished? Do you offer advice? Do you tell stories?

Decide what works best with your consumers or potential consumer base. But you also have to factor in what your strengths are and roll with it.

Another thing you have to anticipate is trends. Certain events (Christmas, Halloween, Labor Day, Independence Day, seasonal changes such as spring or winter, event current events) are searched online as people prepare for them or when they’re en vogue. Timeliness is key here. Good industry-related advice that is conveniently put out around when people are thinking of them are more likely to be shared.

Lastly, you have to make sure that things can be easily found. This means you need to have good tags on your blog posts, you need to have good SEO, and you also need to use keywords in both your blog posts and in your social media messaging.

So — are you convinced yet on the importance of blogging?