Allocating a budget to content marketing isn’t always easy in the convincing department, so when you’re looking to share some reasons to blog with the higher-ups, start here.
A company blog is the most useful section of any business website, so if you’re looking for reasons to blog, begin with practicality. It’s more important than your homepage, your team page, your pricing page, and even your e-commerce pages.
If you have a blog, this is where customers are most likely to land first when they arrive on your site. If you have a search-optimized blog, they’ve asked a question in Google and have arrived on a blog post that gives them a good answer, with you as their expert. A blog provides you with hundreds of pages (opportunities) to be their sherpa.
1. People buy from other people, not businesses. The best salespeople succeed because they are really good at “peopling.” Introverts get my vibe here, but for extroverts, being a well-liked people-person is just a fact of life. Their customers consider them friends. Developing a voice on your blog is like developing a digital salesperson who answers questions when people searching within your niche come ‘a calling.
So you sell plungers, let’s say you’re plungers-r-us-dot-com. Think you can’t blog? Come up with a series of articles about unclogging toilets, and sinks, and every drain in a house or business. When people search for those topics, they’ll find you, and they’ll buy your plunger when they’re done reading your helpful article. Every business can blog. Here some blogging ideas for a variety of industries.
2. The rest of your website isn’t search optimized enough. Sorry, friend. Even the best SEO company can’t get you found for all the search terms you want if your website is only made of a few pages. That’s one of the many good reasons to blog. If your website consists of a home page, a pricing page, a contact us page, an about us page (you get the idea), you can only truly optimize a few of those pages for search, and only a few keywords per page. Oh, and if your SEO guys are stuffing your page with keywords, fire them.
The only way to improve search optimization is to begin creating more pages full of content that are targeted for 1-2 keywords each. A blog is the best way to do this.
3. More people will buy when they arrive on your blog first. Have you ever tried to sell something to someone without introducing yourself first? Hi, give me money. My product is great. I swear! Then why would you expect someone to arrive on a sales page and give you money? Our clients see their highest conversion rates through blog posts. Not through paid traffic to their sales pages, but from the calls to action on their blog articles.
When blog post content offers evergreen, how-to, expert information that is related to the industry you’re in, and addresses the pain points of your customers, your blog posts will become your best “sales people” for your company. Our content is the #1 sales channel for many of our clients.
When looking for reasons to blog and developing content for your company blog, I love this template from the Content Marketing Institute. It makes sure you’re developing content that’s not only useful for you, but touches on the pain points of your target customers.
If you need help developing your corporate blogging strategy, and need a partner to develop professional, expert content, learn more about our Content Audits.
