Four Reasons Your Small Business Needs to Start a Blog Tomorrow
Your next marketing move should be starting a blog.
I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. According to Quoracreative, more than 3/4 of online users read blogs consistently. People read blog articles to learn more information or gain new insights on things that interest them. You may be wondering what kind of information your business could provide in a blog, and how this could possibly lead to more customers and more revenue.
The simple answer is that the customers will come pouring in when you write to provide value to them. Here are some reasons that 55% of marketers say blogging is their top inbound marketing priority.
It boosts your marketing ROI.
A blog is a great way to increase your return on investment, mostly because it’s low-cost and super easy to get started. According to a 2018 report by Hubspot, businesses who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI in their marketing efforts.
If you’re in an industry that has a target audience that is hungry for information, and your competitors don’t currently have blogs, you’re in a great spot to get started! Don’t freak out about your writing ability either, there are free tools, like the spelling and grammar check in Google Docs, that will help you improve your skills as a blogger.
It gives your business more credibility.
People that need your business’s products or services are looking for a solution to a problem. Help them realize how you can be their solution by sharing your knowledge and experience within your industry. What is something they don’t know that you can provide insight on?
After learning more about the inbound marketing approach to attracting more customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing tactics, we know that once you identify what issues your customers face on a daily basis, you learn more about how to attract them, convert them, and delight them.
It can be your strongest lead magnet.
Oozlemedia reports that companies with updated and optimized blogs tend to get 67% more leads than those who don’t. Make sure you’re writing your blog posts with a simple goal in mind: you want your reader to take a particular action by the time they’re done reading your post.
To do this, make sure to include a call-to-action (CTA) in every single blog that you write. Your CTAs should be related to the content of your blog and provide even more value to the reader.
You can see an example of a call-to-action a few paragraphs above. I mentioned a previous blog post of mine that can provide more information on inbound marketing in the last section, so I linked to the blog post once again just below that paragraph. That way, it will still catch the attention of anyone that is simply skimming my blog post.
Other examples are free content offers within your posts that your readers can use to help solve their problem. I use these in my blogs too, with a brief form asking for my readers to fill out so that I can track downloads.
To implement a strong CTA, simply brainstorm what other questions your visitors might have while reading your blog. Then, create an action associated with helping them answer that question.
It’s great for search engine optimization (SEO).
When your ideal customers search for solutions to their problems, you want to make sure they land on your website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy in which you optimize your web pages to rank first organically on search engine results pages (SERPs).
By creating a blog, you’re increasing the number of pages on your website, boosting your site’s authority in search engine algorithms. Additionally, businesses with blogs receive up to 97% more links to their website, or backlinks, which are also an important factor in ranking on SERPs.
Although you may not be ready to start your blog tomorrow, consider these blogging statistics when building your small business’s marketing strategy for 2020.