How Your Blog Can Help You Grow Your Business
Every business owner and marketer knows how important return on investment is. What some might not realise is that a blog is one of the most effective channels to leverage when pursuing this goal.
With a blog, you can engage both existing and prospective customers more effectively, promote your business more frequently and make more sales. It’s also an affordable marketing channel!
To better understand what a blog can do for your business growth, consider the following ways you can use it to drive revenue.
1. Sharing Information with your Teams
A blog is a useful marketing tool for several reasons; consistent data generation is one of them. If you post relevant entries on a regular schedule, you have consistent opportunities to find out what types of content tend to engage readers most effectively. Once you have that vital data, you can use it to create stronger marketing content in the future to attract more customers.
Don’t treat your blog or marketing team as separate from the rest of the business.
However, that’s not the only valuable way to use it. You can also provide other departments in your company with useful insights. Don’t treat your blog or marketing team as separate from the rest of the business. When you know what types of content your readers react to the most (particularly readers of a certain demographic), you can provide your sales team with key information that will help them during their future interactions with customers. Your blog will enable your sales team to leverage its contents in their conversations and strengthen their funnels.
2. Driving Conversions
A blog can drive conversions in many ways. Quite simply, it gives potential customers a reason to visit your site frequently. You can leverage this regular traffic to promote your products and services. How? By simply monitoring engagement to find out what types of content your followers are most drawn to.
By blogging regularly about your niche, you’ll drive more traffic to your site, promote your products and services and drive more conversions.
For instance, New York Times bestselling author and digital marketing expert Neil Patel began blogging on ways to drive more traffic to websites after realising that the readers of his QuickSprout blog engaged with and responded to that type of content. His blog helped him turn readers into customers. By writing posts that address a specific need, Patel not only gives his audience a valuable resource they check frequently, but he also uses this resource to promote his own digital marketing services and yield more sales.
You can take the same approach with your business. By blogging regularly about your niche, you’ll drive more traffic to your site, promote your products and services and drive more conversions.
3. Improving Your Sales
A blog provides insights about what your customers are interested in, which can give you ideas for product improvements or new products your customers would find useful.
To better understand how to use a blog in this capacity, consider the example of Pat Flynn. Flynn is now a millionaire who makes a living teaching clients how to earn passive income. However, according to an interview with Forbes, that was not always his career path.
Flynn used to work for an architectural firm. In an effort to make himself more valuable to his employer, Flynn decided to earn a special certification, which required passing a difficult exam. He chose to blog about studying for the exam simply as a means of keeping himself focused.
Your marketing team can use the insights gathered from your blog to facilitate the work of your product design team.
What Flynn didn’t expect was that his blog would become very popular among readers preparing for the same exam. Realising his blog could be more valuable than he initially thought, Flynn started developing a study guide in the meantime.
He eventually published the guide as a PDF on his website. Using the blog to promote it, Flynn earned thousands of dollars in sales in his first month of selling alone. Readers were willing to spend money on his product because the free content on the blog was already clearly valuable.
Flynn simply monitored his traffic, realised his audience needed a specific product and created it for them. Any company in any sector can do the same. Your marketing team can use the insights gathered from your blog to facilitate the work of your product design team.
4.Creating an Organic Environment for Your Testimonials
Testimonials from your customers can be a very useful means of establishing social proof. According to Inc, 84 per cent of consumerstrust online customer reviews to the same degree that they trust recommendations from their own friends.
Compared to a testimonials page on your website, a blog gives you a more organic environment in which to include your testimonials. A few random quotations from former customers on a landing page are definitely less effective than a quotation inserted naturally into a well-written blog post.
One of the most effective ways of implementing this strategy is by interviewing your customers and writing about their success stories. Your post will give their company visibility and therefore motivate them to share your contents on their social media platforms and with their own customers. This, in turn, will generate more traffic, leads and sales for your company too.
Testimonials from your customers can be a very useful means of establishing social proof.
These are all points to consider when planning your blogging strategy. Most importantly, however, remember to always post high-quality content and monitor the performance of your blog to determine what content your readers respond to most. This will help you drive as much revenue as possible from it.