With apologies to Hamlet:
To blog, or not to blog, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler for the business to publish
The musings and insights of one’s expertise
Or to put one’s marketing efforts into a sea of hashtags
On social media, and let the blog slip idly by unwritten.
The decision to blog isn’t quite the existential threat Hamlet faces in his soliloquy, but for marketing purposes, it can be pretty important. But how important, exactly? Blogging is one of those marketing efforts that takes a lot of time. And let’s face it, we’re not writing Shakespearean soliloquies, we’re trying to bring awareness to our client’s businesses.
According to Hubspot, companies that blog have much better marketing results than companies that don’t. Blogging companies have 55% more visitors to their websites, with 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. This means not only are a lot more visitors coming to your website, but you’re also going to show up in more search engine results.
For those of us in the content marketing business, we know it can take some convincing for companies to jump into blogging. It takes a lot more time and effort to write a blog than it does to post a marketing message to social media. Fortunately for business owners, they don’t have to do all the work themselves. They can turn to marketing and advertising agencies for help with blogging. And blogging is about more than just driving traffic to your website.
As Forbes reports, a blog builds authority and trust in a business. When a customer is looking for a product or service, and two competing businesses look similar, the business with a regular blog will establish a stronger sense of trustworthiness and expertise in the customer’s mind.
Blogs are not just about selling products and services though. They are a way to communicate with customers, to let them get to know a business in a different way than social media allows. It’s a way to let customers know about the direction a business is heading, and a way to ask customers for their input.
As Small Business Trends wrote last year, blogging has been around since the beginning of the internet, but it’s still an important way to communicate with customers, establish expertise for your business, develop business leads, and educate customers about not just products, but the details of how your business works. Blogging is still worth it.
