Today I’m going to share 8 ways your blog can give you a marketing advantage. Are you posting regular content on your blog every week for free? If this content contains interesting and relevant information that helps your customers in some way or other, then it can be your primary online content marketing tool.
“Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves, their wants, their needs. Content Marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about, so they actually pay attention to you.”
Joe Pulizzi – Epic Content Marketing
Here’s 8 Ways Your Blog Can Give You a Marketing Advantage:
1. It improves the lives of your prospects and customers.
Your prospects want to live happier, healthier, and richer lives. If you can offer this through your blog, then in return for your generosity they’ll reward you with their attention and loyalty. That includes following you on social media and subscribing to your newsletter. In addition to joining your email list, sending email enquiries, browsing your shop, and buying products.
2. It helps your website get picked up by search engines.
Regularly updated websites with original and genuinely helpful content have more “authority”. Therefore, they are ranked higher by Google and other search engines. This means your website will become more visible online and also more credible.
3. It’s low-cost advertising.
Rather than using traditional advertising such as Google Adwords, banner ads, pop-ups, etc., your blog will draw in an audience, not just from search engines, but also from social media. The more your posts are shared on social networks, then the more traffic you pick up. This is free marketing. Once you generate an income this way, you’ll have more to spend on paid advertising later.
4. You’ll build credibility and trust.
By creating fresh, current, helpful content on topics that will be of interest to your prospects you immediately build engagement and trust. As a result, they’ll return to your blog regularly for updates. Trust is a fundamental driver of sales.
5. You help your prospects avoid information overload.
The internet is saturated with information of varying quality and accuracy. So, people often search out and follow individuals and businesses who can offer them clarity and honesty. As well as guidance they can rely on and trust. They’ll then form an allegiance with these individuals and businesses in the future. This connection makes them more inclined to buy from them too.
6. You stand out from the crowd.
By sharing interesting content on your website in your own voice and with your own personality you become unique. You offer something distinct with which your competition cannot compete.
7. You can generate content hands-free.
Your customers and fans will happily comment and discuss issues in your blog. This massively increases the page views on your site and the number of repeat visits. Not only does this give you more opportunities to convert people into subscribers, enquirers, and customers, it also boosts your search rankings, generating more traffic. A further benefit is that it’s an easy way to populate a website with dynamic new material. Every time someone adds a comment that’s new content for your site.
8. It’s a useful sales tool.
You can use some of your blog posts to promote a product or service directly or indirectly. So long as most of your posts offer useful or entertaining content for free, your readers will accept, and even look forward to, promotions or offers that are relevant to their interests.
A promotional blog post allows you to sell through social media. By sharing a sales-based blog on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, for example, you can go directly to your social media followers with an offer. An advantage of this is that they don’t need to be on your email database. You can also do this without it looking like you’re trying to sell on social media, which is never popular.
Remember…
Your customers care primarily about themselves and their success. So, it’s essential that you regularly share advice, tips and reminders that customers will find helpful.
You should also have a call to action like a form to sign up for your email newsletter. This helps your blog to drive conversions and build a database of prospects. You can even set these forms to follow the visitor up and down the page as they scroll.
Make sure that you provide the opportunity to comment. This is a great way to get some interaction going. You should also add social media sharing buttons beneath posts. Two of the more common services that’ll allow you to do this are:
ShareThis – https://www.sharethis.com
AddThis – https://www.addthis.com
I hope my 8 Ways Your Blog Can Give You a Marketing Advantage post helps you to make the most of your own blog. In addition, I hope that you see an increase in your page views, engagement and ultimately sales.
To Your Success!
