The Importance of Blogging

Blogging is so 2012 and only for influencers, right? Wrong! ​

Just like the other core tenets of digital marketing, including email marketing and social media marketing, blogging has been around for a while and for good reason. Not only does it help a company establish subject matter expertise within its online community but blogging also helps with SEO best practices by creating new content on your website. ​

It can feel like a burden, dedicating time and effort to writing blog posts consistently and repeatedly, especially if there isn’t the web traffic or engagement to make it feel worthwhile. But even if your blog posts don’t inspire hundreds of comments or thousands of shares, there are still reasons why it’s important to continue blogging for the benefit of your business.

Here are just a few reasons why blogging is helping your digital marketing strategy, even if you can’t see it yet:

Proves Subject Matter Expertise

If the blog posts you publish on your website are well-written and factually accurate, then with each post you are providing information for your community. The more consistently you post helpful and interesting information within your community, the more brand awareness that you are building. And that’s a great thing!

Staying on top of trends and news that’s relevant to your industry and services will also have the effect of turning your website and blog into a resource for your community members. This will impact some of the other points we’ll talk about in a bit too.

Improves SEO Rankings

While search engines such as Google are constantly refining and improving their algorithms for website rankings, there are a few best practices that are known to increase the search engine optimization, or SEO, of a website. Adding new content to your site in the form of blog posts is an effective way to get new content on your website without needing to edit the main pillar pages.

There are other ways to improve your website’s SEO and we’ve talked about them in the past. But for now, it’s easy to remember that consistently and regularly blogging adds fresh content to your website, and search engines prioritize and reward that behavior.

Creates Content for Social Media

When you are working on building a comprehensive content marketing campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Repurposing content in one form to other formats is a pivotal component in maximizing the outreach of your content while keeping your content calendar full.

If you have a blog post that has evergreen content, you can always pull a quote from it to use in a Tweet or design a graphic around it for Instagram. If you are promoting an upcoming blog post that’s an interview with someone who has their own social media following, tease the release on LinkedIn or Facebook. Don’t forget to tag your interviewee and use any relevant hashtags!

Important Part of Inbound Strategy

We’ve talked about the inbound strategy in many a previous Four Tens blog post. If you aren’t familiar with the inbound marketing strategy, HubSpot has an in-depth review of it. ​

Blogging can be an asset when you are determining the kinds of content you need primarily for the Attract and Engage stages. Blogging is a great way to attract new customers since we already know that it improves your website’s SEO and proves that you are a subject matter expert. The goal is to provide value for potential customers who are searching for any related keywords to your product or service.

But blogging is also helpful in the Engage stage. When potential customers have identified their problem/need, you may have already attracted their attention but will need to engage with them to make them want to build a long-term relationship with your company. Blogging about case studies (if relevant) and solution based selling information will keep potential customers interested without feeling pandered to in a forceful way. You want to show why your product or service is helpful, not tell people to buy it without reason.

A Strong Part of an Advertising Campaign

Paid advertising is a constantly and dramatically shifting landscape. Remember pop-up ads from the 00’s? Now, advertising on websites and social media has a more organic look. On social media channels especially, like Instagram, it can be almost impossible in some cases to differentiate between paid ads and organic content.

How does blogging connect with advertising? If you have strong blog content that can provide value during the Attract stage of the inbound methodology, that can be the center of your paid advertising campaign. With a series of blog posts about a particular subject related to your company’s main keywords, you can promote the blog post in your paid advertisements, driving potential customers to your website and blog to learn more.

Increases Visitors to Your Website

With all the benefits that we talked about above, the main takeaway is that blog content has the power to increase the number of visitors to your website. And that’s huge! With an increase in the number of both organic and paid leads to your website, you’re increasing the likelihood of converting leads into customers. And the whole point of marketing is to market your product to customers so that they’ll buy it.

The other important point is that your blog has the most value and pull when you are actively contributing and monitoring it. Create a blog content calendar and publishing schedule. Small businesses should start with a feasible and realistic schedule. If that’s every two weeks, start there. If even that seems impossible, you can always hire a ghostwriter or agency to write blog posts for you. For larger, more established businesses, posting multiple times a week may be a better fit to successfully encourage engagement within your community and leads.

When it comes down to it, a company or business blog is a marketing tool, just like a CRM tool helps with digital marketing strategies. A blog will be as effective as the amount of effort and time that you put into it. And don’t be discouraged if you don’t see engagement right away, or even within the first few months of blogging. Digital marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. It can take a while for your efforts to show results organically. And even the small act of consistently adding new content to your website will be enough to improve your website’s SEO.

Not sure where to start on your digital marketing journey? Four Tens has you covered. We apply an “Easy Button” approach to digital marketing strategies, so that you can just say the word, and we’ll have your marketing covered.