As a business, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to communicate to potential customers. Do you put money into advertising on TV or the radio? Do you try your luck with ads on the internet? Before you fall down the rabbit hole of conventional advertising, it might be worth your while to look at a blog. A blog might be just the tool you need to make an impact on your target market and see real changes in the business that you receive. Not sold? We’ve put together a few reasons why a blog can help connect you to your customers in a way that no generic ad in the paper or radio ever could.
Improve the customer experience you offer. Your blog can answer customers’ questions before they knew they had any, and it shows you’re willing to help them and give them information that is free and easy to obtain. Your customers’ experience can be essential to distinguish your brand from your competitors, and your blog is an excellent tool for exceeding customer expectations. In fact, a Walker Study says that customer experience will be more important for brand differentiation than both price and product by 2020. With such a large number of products and services on the market today, having strong brand recognition is crucial to sustaining a thriving business model.
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Engagement goes hand in hand with what kind of experience your customer has and how they feel about you as a business. Blogging is a fantastic form of engagement because it allows you to communicate at a more personal level rather than to an audience that may or may not be listening. If you can find a way to show your audience that you have a passion about what you are writing, it allows your audience to feel like they can contact and engage with you about your product or service. Over time, you will establish yourself as an expert in your field and a memorable brand when they are thinking of making a purchase. Another important characteristic of a blog that drives engagement is the lack of a sales pitch. People can tell when someone is selling to them and it may push them away. Ideally, you should focus on creating content that people will find interesting rather than just spewing out some words with a selling idea crammed in the middle. Once you have grabbed the consumer’s attention and they respect what you have to say, you can begin to formulate a way to plug your product or service.
Blogging for your business can also improve your search engine optimization. Also known as SEO, this is the process of making sure that your business appears closer to the top of search results when someone searches for keywords that may involve your business. Search engines crawl the internet and keep track of every web page they come across so they can give people the most relevant links. Your site’s code should include metadata with these terms, but a blog can help in that it naturally adds more of the words and phrases people may be looking for. If you want to take this a step further, you can even look up what keywords get the most attention for free using Google Trends. Once you know what the buzzwords for your industry are, you can begin to insert them into your posts.
A business blog is free. Well, almost. Assuming you are the one writing it, the only thing it will cost you is a little bit of your time. According to a survey by Orbit Media, the average blog only takes two and a half hours to write. This may seem like more time than you would wish to put into a blog, but when you realize everything blogging is capable of you’ll see it’s worth the investment.
By now you probably realize that blogging can be an important part of your business because of the endless possibilities it may provide. However, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re busy with what seems like a million different things. Of course you see the benefit in blogging, but you still don’t think you have the time to research quality content and put all the pieces together. This is where Q Strategies can help. We can simplify the process for you and get your business started on your way to a professional, quality blog.
References:
Andy Crestodina. Survey of 1000+ Bloggers: How to Be in the Top 5%. Retrieved from https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-analysis/
Walker Information. CUSTOMERS 2020. Retrieved from http://www.walkerinfo.com/customers2020/
Topics: Blogging