If you aren’t familiar with the power of blogging, then you’ve missed some of the most important developments in advertising from the last few years. Here are some of the main reasons why you should work blogging into your marketing plan – or avoid it in its entirety.
To Blog: The Power to Get Noticed
At its core, blogging is a simple yet powerful tool – the ability to create a series of pages, each of which holds unique content, and use those pages to fill the results of search engines and ultimately attract new customers. Consider the following:
- According to the marketing statistics of HubSpot, 44% of online shoppers will start their quest through a search engine – not by going directly to a major retailer like Amazon. There isn’t much you can do to get noticed if you never have the opportunity, but when you consider it from a different perspective, then nearly half of all shoppers will start by looking in a place you can reach – and that’s a lot of people.
- A majority of all people using search engines will focus their clicks on the top organic content that search engines provide – and blog posts are universally considered organic content acceptable to display in a search engine. Paid advertising, quite frankly, isn’t a very effective technique – averaging about 2% in comparison to the 70% of clicks that go for organic results.
- Bigger websites are considerably more likely to attract leads and bring them into a sales funnel. Small sites – those of less than 100 pages – simply don’t have enough presence online… and as blogs can easily create a new page for every post, it’s a straightforward matter to build up a website over time.
- Blogging can be done by anyone with enough skill. If a business has quiet hours, one or more employees can easily spend that time writing up blog posts, creating a steady stream of content for the site. Alternatively, professional bloggers can be hired to ensure a consistent level of quality and help get the blog off the ground – not a minor consideration for the early months, when the blog’s effects will be minimal.
Not To Blog: The Other Side of the Story
Actually, there aren’t very many reasons to avoid blogging – not when 92% of businesses who create more than one blog post a day have been able to obtain customers through their blog. Analytics software also comes into play, helping businesses understand what their potential customers are interested in, what the readers avoid, and how the blog can be improved over time. However, there are a few other factors to keep in mind, and blogging might not be for you if your company falls into any of these categories.
- Single-Customer Businesses: If your business exists for the exclusive aid of another group (such as a larger company, the government, or anything in that lane), then you don’t really need to have a presence online… and blogging is probably going to be a waste of your time. On the other hand, if you’re competing for certain contracts from your customer, it may help to host a blog and demonstrate your work over time – well-written blogs will make your business seem professional, and being able to use the posts as evidence of how you performed on past jobs can work well for future negotiations.
- Alternate Advertising: There’s a reason that most movie theaters don’t maintain blogs – small theaters that show specialty films might use them, but all a major theater really needs to do is be available and present on ticket sites like Fandango. This is alternate advertising – when a business doesn’t need an online presence to attract customers, especially if somebody else is doing their advertising for them (i.e. trailers on television and YouTube, magazine articles, etc.). Businesses like these should consider a mailing list instead, sending advertisements directly to registered customers and using that as a venue of announcing special offers or new additions. This mostly applies to larger businesses, but it can apply to some types of smaller businesses, especially as technology develops.
- Mandated Customers: Most people want electricity going to their homes. They also want water, sewage, and basic needs taken care of – which are often run by utility companies that are likely the only company in a given area supplying those services. In short, the customers are all buy guaranteed – and there’s no point in blogging about them.
These three types of companies all have one thing in common: A special situation that renders blogging near-pointless. In other words, you either have those benefits or you don’t – and if you don’t, then blogging is all but guaranteed to help you establish yourself as a company and truly begin to grow.
