Mike Schertenlieb
It seems like every business has a blog these days (you’re reading ours right now!), but if you’ve yet to join to legions of bloggers out there, you might be wondering… What’s the point?
The reasons to run a business blog are numerous. Even if you aren’t actually the one doing the writing and posting, you should have someone creating blog posts for your company on a regular basis.
Enough dilly dally, though… Here’s why you need a blog:
1. For The Robots
Search engines are constantly crawling and indexing your website. They look for all kinds of things to determine your ranking in search results and the overall “value” of your site. New pages and fresh content are among the things these robots crawl for, and blogs are a wonderful way to satisfy them!
Every time you post a blog, you’re adding a new URL to your site’s index of pages, as well as all the fresh content that page contains.
…And since you’re typically going to be posting blogs related to your business and overall industry, it will be relevant, contextual, and further establish your site as “in your industry.”
In short, blogging is great for SEO.
2. Showcase Expertise
People do business with companies they trust. When you showcase your experience and expertise through helpful articles, you’ll cultivate a relationship with your prospects. Even if they don’t purchase from you right away, you’ll become a source of valued information – and when it’s time to buy, where do you think they’ll turn?
Blogs are a wonderful way to show not just what you do, but how and why. You get to explain your processes. You have the opportunity to show how your product/service solves problems, and showcase your broader knowledge of your industry and common customer needs.
If you sell an educational product, you don’t have to give away the whole farm – but establishing some expertise goes a long way in developing the trust necessary for long-term customer relationships.
3. Pull Back The Curtain
Blogs are also a wonderful way to sing the praises of your team! We do a series of Employee Spotlights, talk about our volunteerism, and even share stories of the first year on the job.
You can use blog posts to humanize your company – to show prospects and customers that your business is composed of real people with real lives and personalities.
Some of this goes back to trust, where prospects that feel like they know you personally are more likely to feel a sense of connection to your business. It can also cut down on complaints and demands because you’re no longer a faceless company name – there are human beings on the other end of angry emails and phone calls.
Your blogs can be a portal into the actual day to day of your company, where you become more than your logo and the things you sell.
4. Social Media Fodder
As you build your log of articles, you’ll have that much more material to post to your social media pages. Unlike random articles and videos, sharing your blog will direct people back to your site, where you’ll have even more information waiting for them!
Once you get into a rhythm of posting, you’ll have fresh blogs and social media posts week after week (or however often you publish blogs). This helps you stay top of mind for the people following your social profiles, and presents your informative articles to an even wider audience.
There are really no downsides here, except for maybe the time commitment. It takes time and effort to craft a good blog post, but it’s well worth the energy. In fact, you can farm out your writing tasks to companies like us! With a little bit of setup to determine voice and the details to include, you can hand off your blog to a skilled writer. Fine tuning as you go, you can gain all the benefits of a blog while expending a fraction of the effort.
Let us know if we can help!
