Blogs are a great way to connect with your audience and update your website with regular content. And better still, they’re an inexpensive and effective way to remain visible, build your brand and increase sales.
But only if you’re consistent and post valuable content that's relevant to your business and audience. There’s nothing worse than going onto a website and finding the blogs are old ones from last year, or even before.
So, if you’re serious about including a blog page on your website, you need to make sure it is updated regularly and that you write about topics that resonate with your audience.
Why write a regular business blog?
As a copywriter, I spend a lot of time researching online and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies have the wrong approach to their blogs.
Some start off posting regularly, and then just stop while others write copy that is weak in content or irrelevant to their industry. Then some think that stuffing the text with keywords will boost their search rankings. None of these approaches will help your business they could harm both your reputation and search engine rankings.
So before you add a B2B business blog to next year’s marketing strategy, think carefully about whether you have the resources in house to be able to post regularly (or you could outsource this to a copywriter!) and why you want to blog.
If you’re not sure why you want to start posting blogs, then here are 7 reasons why I think they're good for your business.
1. Improve search engine rankings - Search engines look for new, relevant content, so posting regularly means more pages are indexed on your website, which helps to increase your chances of showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Establishes your expertise – writing about your industry, discussing issues, sharing insights or valuable information will help to establish your authority and position you as the ‘go to’ company for useful material. What better way to set yourself apart from your competitors?
3. Engage with people – Blogs are about having a conversation with your audience, not preaching to them or bamboozling them with corporate or technical jargon. You want your audience to feel you’re talking directly to them. People are more likely to buy from companies they feel they have a connection with.
4. Increase leads and conversions – when you write about topics that are relevant to your target audience, you’re likely to start turning readers into leads. And, as you’ve been writing content that’s specific to them, these will be qualified leads and more likely to convert.
5. Extend your audience reach - You’re not only engaging with your target audience but also their circle. If you write about something that a reader finds of use, informative or even entertaining, they’ll share it with their contacts. This extends your reach and prospects.
6. Help with link building – writing engaging and useful blogs can help to generate backlinks from another website to your site. Backlinks are important for your SEO as search engines see this as a vote of confidence from another source. They also help to build your domain authority.
You can also link internally to other information from a blog, or to a blog from product pages etc. Internal link building helps users to navigate your website and helps Google to find content on your site and rank it in search results.
7. Additional marketing material– you’ve spent time coming up with an idea and writing a great, thought-provoking blog, so why not use it as much as you can! Your blog doesn’t have to just sit on your website, you can repurpose it to create additional content and share with your audience through social media posts, videos, emails etc.
Of course, you can also use other marketing assets such as cases studies and whitepapers for your blogs.
A few tips for your business blog
Starting a blog can be daunting, but don't worry, once you start you'll be fine. Just to be natural and:
• Write for your customer – people don’t care about your business. They care about how you can help them, make their lives easier or solve a problem. So write for your customer.
• Call to action – You’ve got the reader’s attention so why not ask them to do something. But make it relevant and not a sales push. This is a great opportunity to ask them to sign up for your newsletter or download a whitepaper.
• Consistency – I touched on this at the beginning. It doesn’t look good if your last blog post was months or even years ago. Writing an engaging blog does take time so you don’t have to post weekly or even monthly, just be consistent.
• Analyse and review – Track what’s happening with your blogs. Look at which ones gain the most engagement, what topics people tend to react to and also what hasn’t worked. This will help you to refine your strategy as you go along.
Start blogging in 2022
Whenever you post a blog it is another opportunity to drive traffic to your website, show search engines that your site is active and relevant and help boot your SERPs. If you think about it, there are very few other activities that can give you these results without breaking your marketing budget.
When you compare the cost of blogging to the cost of advertising, PPC, email campaigns or even PR, it really does make good business sense to include a blog in your 2022 marketing strategy.
Need help with your B2B blog? If you don’t have the time or resources to write a business blog, get in touch. I can research and write relevant and engaging copy to make your business stand out and reach new customers.
Click here for information on my Website and Blog Copywriting services and to see examples of my work.