Blogging used to be all the craze. Around 2010, movies featured bloggers as central characters. Blogging was an expected job, a central part of marketing any business. In recent years, however, the tide has turned. Instead of being the leading character on the digital marketing landscape, blogging is just one part of a complex web of digital marketing approaches that seem to revolve increasingly around social media strategies focused on high-profile platforms.
Nonetheless, blogs have not died; nor are they obsolete. In fact, they have evolved and can unlock a business’s growth potential. Social media strategy focused on big-name platforms is almost never enough. You need a strong web presence in a much larger sense to really move people into the sales funnel.
Why are blogs central to a strong web presence? Because blogs enable businesses to highlight things they do and expertise they have that may not be readily apparent in the concise, short format of a social media post or even a regular landing page. They also pull in new viewers from search engines and take them directly to your site, where the ability to make a purchase or connect directly with you is nearby and easy.
Of course, we Mat Hatters are biased. Here we are, writing a blog to you right now. But we do it because blogging works. It’s one of the many digital marketing strategies we use to engage with our customers, and it’s one thing we encourage many of our clients to pursue for the following really good reasons.
Bring More Visitors to Your Site
One of the main reasons to have a blog as part of your digital marketing strategy is to make your business’s website show up in online search results. Blogs can be search engine optimized just like regular web pages, and therefore, they often pop up in search results for very specific topics. A blog where you post regularly can increase the number of pages available for search engines to crawl, increasing your likelihood to show up in search results over time and helping you show up for topics so niche you would never think to mention them on the main pages of your website. A blog allows you to continue growing your site and your overall web presence long after you launch your core website.
Because blogs help you generate a massive amount of expert content, they are attractive places for other people, websites, and businesses to link to. In fact, businesses who blog regularly have 97% more links to their website than businesses who do not maintain a blog. You can rarely (if ever) include as much niche expert content on your core website as you can on a blog. Most company websites can only handle a limited number of pages before they become difficult to navigate. However, with a blog, you can create unlimited posts about an infinite number of topics, without confusing your site visitors with extra navigational elements or a cluttered array of pages. Plus, when a customer ends up on your blog, they are but a click away from where they can purchase what you offer or engage with you directly.
Keep Your Business Current and in Context
Blogs are a way to keep your business’s profile current without updating your entire website. Say you sell products for rodeo teams. On your static website, you have pages featuring those products and probably other pages that talk about your company’s background with rodeo supply, but would you necessarily have a page about how to throw a lasso? Would you be able to have a page that ranks the top competitors in your region’s rodeo semifinals? Probably not. But you can write blog posts about these topics, and people will read them because they are fresh and current.
A blog allows you to respond to recent events and showcase your offerings in ways that highlight how those offerings serve needs customers have right now. You can also show the evolution of your business and call attention to product updates or new events.
Establish Industry Expertise
Blog posts allow you to say more and use more detail than other pages on your site. They certainly provide you with more space than a social media post. Blogs showcase what you know, and they show your ability to link what you do to today’s market or social conditions. People will see your expertise when your blog posts show up in search results, and you can direct people to your blog when you are out in the world giving presentations or promoting your business in other ways. A blog can elevate you as a thought leader, and it serves as an archive of your ideas, projects, and innovations.
Add Personality and Engagement
Blogging is part of the social media landscape with one clear advantage: your blog posts live outside major social media platforms in a site owned by you. You can post a teaser on Instagram that leads to a blog with more details related to that post. And if you have comments enabled, your website (not Facebook’s or Instagram’s) can be a site for conversation and personal connection with visitors. Blog posts are also incredibly shareable and can give customers the opportunity to pass along an interesting post to other potential leads. That is digital marketing gold!
A blog might let an otherwise formal and stuffy business let its hair down a little. It could show your sophisticated taste or might give you a chance to talk about partner businesses and brands that are similar to the identity you are building for yourself. Blogs are a flexible and broadly applicable digital marketing tool.
Get a Head Start on Your Blog
At Mad Hat Haven, we create content of all kinds, including blog posts. We can help you determine where blogs fit into your overall digital marketing strategy and develop a calendar that coordinates all your digital marketing efforts—from social media posts, to websites, to emails, to blogs. For a free consultation (yes, FREE), contact Mad Hat Maven today.
