You’ve read about the benefits a blog can bring your business — more traffic, leads, authority, and a better relationship with your audience. And you’re undoubtedly itching to get started. Pull up a chair, and let’s talk.

If you’re curious how a well-curated blog can help your business, I’m going to run the whole thing down for you below.

Here’s the key takeaway: business blogging is an inexpensive marketing tactic to increase brand awareness, website visibility, customer satisfaction, and business growth.

90% of North America’s top-performing companies rely on consistent blog article creation to generate revenue and they count their blog among their top inbound marketing priorities.

A regular blog boosts traffic, generates leads, improves brand authority, and is a more efficient way to build a relationship with your user base than almost any other tool.

A successful blog keeps users informed and engaged with your brand, and attracts new people who are already looking for your services. A custom blog also empowers sales efforts, as it gives your sales team promotional content they can point to directly.

Fresh, blog content will help bring more attention to your website and generate new leads in the following seven ways:

Drive traffic to your website

While you can place your faith in paid ads or cold email marketing campaigns, hoping that people will embrace your company’s products or services with no previous knowledge or interest is a risky and often quite expensive endeavor. Hiring a blog content specialist on the other hand, takes that same money and invests it in writing evergreen articles that will live forever on your site, each one filled to the brim with key phrases and questions targeted to your ideal audience.

Organic SEO based blog article creation brings people already interested in what you’re selling right to your doorstep.

If you’re a Canadian car insurance broker, for instance, your blog should not be targeting motorcycle insurance in the wintertime. But the moment spring rolls around, you can pivot to what people actually need, and your blog can start producing content geared to motorcycle culture and insurance trends. Suddenly, as Google sees a spike in searches related to motorcycles, it privileges your blog because you’re writing buzzworthy content.

Your blog is promoting motorcycle insurance in the month of April, and when people start actively searching for that term online in May, Google will actively push users to your website.

And your user has not been lured in by a pay-per-click ad. Instead, that user visiting your site actually wants to be there and is ready to open their wallet. That’s what we in the business call organic traffic. You write engaging relevant content and Google sends people to you who have a real interest in buying what you’re selling.

Every time you create and publish a new blog post, you create an opportunity for your website to appear as an authoritative source for information on Google’s search engine results page.

Basically, when you hire a specialist to carefully curate your blog content, producing frequent and well nurtured posts, your website will be visited regularly by people already looking to buy.

Boost search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, also called SEO, is the ongoing process of filling your website with relevant, up to date keywords, phrases, and questions that Google will privilege on its results page. This is best accomplished with a regularly updated blog, as this is the easiest and least expensive way to continually produce topical content.

Simply put, Google privileges websites with more content and with content published more often.

You can’t update your About Us or Product page regularly, but you can publish blog entries whenever you want. And each of those blog articles can link directly to your product page. Consistent blogging allows search engines like Google to constantly index the pages on your site, making you more relevant every time you post.

Develop and strengthen relationships with current and potential customers

Blogging also happens to be the easiest and most efficient way to keep your customers up-to-date on developments in your industry, including new products or services you are unveiling.

It’s been proven that customers who visit blogs routinely also spend more money regularly on those sites.

Is the easiest and most straightforward way to keep your customers up-to-date on news, deals, tips, and other useful information.

Blogging helps to create value for your prospective customers, because visitors always get something free from you before they make a purchase — in the form of relevant, engaging blog article content that answers questions they actually have and are typing into Google.

Lastly, blog content drives users to sales better than cold-call email campaigns or paid ads because your users are already halfway to the finish line. They know what they want, you sell it, and they’ve just found your website. Talk about synergy.

Share news pertinent to your business

Blogs also allow you to share company news and stories.

You’ll seem like a more approachable and trustworthy company when you serve up blog articles sharing success stories surrounding your business, rather than every post being a product push.

This makes a business blog in active channel to connect directly to your visitors and your followers. Through the comment section, you can respond directly to customer queries. This gives you insight into the questions your customers are actually asking. And by tracking analytics, Sterling Content keeps your blog content relevant, and up-to-date.

  • Have you hired a new VP? Share it on your blog.
  • Have a new product? Post it on your blog.
  • Have you just published a brilliant case study highlighting how your services are actually helping people? Let people know by sharing it on your blog.
  • Will you be attending a fair or trade show? Bang the drum and post the details on your blog.

Regular content helps you share company news while also humanizing your brand. It also helps users see that you have more to say besides just plugging products. It increases loyalty among existing customers while also building warmth and trust with new users.

Influence conversions

Fresh, consistent blog content not only drives traffic to your website, but also plays a pivotal role in converting that traffic into leads, while also giving your sales team fresh clay to mold into final conversions.

Consider that a typical lead conversion is a three-step process, including an awareness, consideration, and decision stage. Professional blog management services from a company like Sterling Content strengthens your company’s efforts at all three stages.

During the awareness stage, meticulous SEO research allows us to build articles that target user pain points and then address their challenges. After we research the actual questions people enter into Google, the next step is to provide copy that directly provides an answer to those questions.

That takes us to the consideration stage, where blog articles help audiences understand the solutions that your company can give to their problems. As they read more blog content, they see the direct ways that your company can help them. By the time they visit your product or service page, you’ve already developed an extremely warm lead. And the best part is — the user found their way to you all on their own, which makes them much more likely to spend.

Finally, in the decision stage, users already find themselves reading about their ideal product or service because it was through searching for answers to their specific pain point that they found you. And with the right portfolio of testimonials and case studies to draw from, you can satisfy even the most wary customers who might need proof before making any kind of purchase.

Keyword based content from Sterling Content checks the box on each of these conversion stages, but there’s one last cherry on top — we also produce an SEO generated call to action for each post that will further convert website traffic into high quality leads. A lead generating CTA encourages users to click through a link, bringing them to a contact page, where they will happily exchange information. Try our click through link now to see what we mean!

Increase brand awareness

Finally, a fresh bold blog shows a personal side to your business that makes users more likely to engage with, and spend money on, your brand. Warm, bespoke content makes your blog feel less like a repository of random information, and more like a direct mode of communication between you, your industry, your loyal customers, and your prospective new clients.

These things simply cannot be achieved through other outbound marketing techniques.

A regular blog informs consumers about corporate standards, keeps them up-to-date with regards to your mission and vision, and also helps you stand out from your competitors because the content a blog management company provides is always topical and up-to-date.

This makes it much more relevant both for human users and for Google’s ranking algorithm — which, of course, make up the twin pillars of online marketing.

Ask any marketing expert in the field, and they’ll tell you that content is the absolute bedrock of communication with clients and customers. If customers don’t know who you are, they’ll never trust you enough to work with you.

Hopefully, you’ve found this article helpful. Of course, if you want to learn more, contact us today and we can tell you more.

A customized blog can help you build better leads with better content, so hop to it and start building one now.