11 Signs Your Business Needs Blogging

Does it feel like your business is stuck in a bit of a marketing rut? Are you frustrated with the same old direct mail or email campaigns, and struggling to prove the ROI of your outreach? The solution to your problem might be business blogging – or creating more content if you’re already on it. It’s the single most-effective way to

• Increase your website traffic
• Improve your SEO
• Position your brand as a thought leader
• Improve relationships with prospects and customers!

If you’re not convinced that your company stands to benefit, here are 11 surefire signs that you desperately need to start business blogging:

1. You’re Sick of Not Seeing ROI

If you’re sick of struggling to determine the worth of your marketing, you’re not alone. It’s notoriously difficult to quantify the return on investment of direct mail, radio advertising, and other forms of traditional advertising – so challenging that it’s in fact prohibitive for many small businesses to build the necessary quantitative models.

However, inbound marketing methods are much easier to track, and they’re more effective. HubSpot research has found that 93% of brands using outreach that includes business blogging see fast returns on website visitors:

Image source: hubspot.com

It’s easy to monitor, evaluate, and analyze your business blogging metrics in real time, allowing you to make immediate decisions and know just how effective your outreach is.

To learn more about just how easy it is to monitor the success of content marketing, we recommend Blogging Metrics: How to Find and Apply Actionable Intelligence.

2. Your SEO Stinks

If you’re still relying on antiquated SEO methods like keyword stuffing, cloaking or purchasing links, it’s no wonder you’re not ranking well in search. Google’s algorithm has changed drastically and quickly over the past several years, culminating in the Hummingbird rewrite late last year. Recent surveys of leading SEO experts continue to indicate that the only guaranteed way to improve your rankings is with quality business blogging.

Writing original articles can allow you to build your domain authority, earn links, utilize keywords, and improve your social media shares – and as the image above indicates, these methods are crucial for ranking better in search.

3. You Need Brand Awareness

Your company could have the best products, pricing, quality, and customer service in your niche – but it doesn’t matter if no one’s heard of you. Successful business blogging is a key to the right kind of exposure. By answering your customer’s questions and earning a position as a trusted authority in your industry, you’ll gain a following, who will in turn share their content with friends. It’s difficult to build brand awareness overnight, and nearly impossible to buy it, but offering value to your target audience is among the best ways to get there.

4. You Need Qualified Leads

Are you struggling to generate enough leads to keep your sales team busy? Or are your sales representatives wasting their time working with prospects who lack the budget, authority, timeframe or need to actually make a purchase? Business blogging is actually an amazing tool for generating more, better-qualified leads:

Image source: inboundmarketingagents.com

Epic content acts like a magnet – it draws the right kinds of people to your website by answering their questions, solving their problems, or helping them research branded solutions. This allows you to draw prospects from a more-qualified pool of website visitors, allowing you to kiss the days of paying for bogus leads goodbye!

5. No One Knows Your Brand Story

What’s your brand’s personality? What do you value? How do you make a difference, and why are you better than your competition? Most importantly, why should anyone care? If you can’t answer these questions, there’s a good chance that your colleagues, customers, and prospects can’t, either.

People’s affinity for the narrative is much older than marketing as we know it, and there’s a good chance it’s not going away any time soon. Business blogging gives you the opportunity to share your story, cast your brand as the hero, and surround your company with context.

For more insight, check out How B2B Brand Storytelling Can Benefit Your Business.

6. You’re Renting Your Marketing

Are your marketing assets owned or rented?

It may seem like a strange question, but it’s a far more valid distinction than many marketers realize. When you pay for many forms of media, such as radio, television ads, Pay-Per-Click or billboards, you’re essentially renting it. As soon as you stop paying the bill for the ad space or adwords, these website visitors and leads will go away.

Business blogging creates invaluable assets that your company owns forever. Your evergreen content can be shared again and again, on your social channels, with customers, and in your email newsletters. These kinds of investments pay dividends over time. Despite the fact that business blogging is already a pretty cheap form of marketing outreach, it’s value is staggering when viewed through a long-term lens.

7. Your Brand isn’t Likable

Who doesn’t like Taco Bell’s marketing? Regardless of how you feel about their bean burritos, it’s hard to deny the fact that they’ve got some of the most charismatic marketing, and have for many years. They’ve even been known to send playfully harmless jabs at other brands on Twitter:

Image source: adweek.com

Business blogging is the perfect platform for your brand to develop your own unique voice. Maybe you’re fun and youthful like Taco Bell, eco-conscious like burrito chain Chipotle, or a tad nerdy like General Electric. Regardless of who you are, creating content can allow you to express that voice and define who you really are to your customers.

8. You’re Answering the Same Customer FAQ Repeatedly

There’s a good chance that your sales and customer service team spend quite a lot of time answering the same questions for your clients. Whether they realize it or not, there’s a good chance they type the same 50 answers hundreds of times in a given year. Using these FAQ as inspiration for content creation can allow you to provide value to your prospects, but you can also increase operational efficiency drastically. By creating owned media that your sales team can conveniently share with your clients, you may save hundreds of working hours each year.

9. Your Social Media Engagement is Poor

There’s a bit of an achievement gap in the content marketing realm. While 87% of brands are now using social media, only 71% are creating content. This leaves 16% of marketing managers struggling to figure out exactly how they’ll fill their Facebook and Twitter posts.

Whether you’re on a marketing team of 1 or 20, business blogging can solve your content problem. You’re able to provide original resources to your followers, effectively increasing your engagement and shares, and driving more traffic to your website. Using social media without original content is possible – it’s just not nearly as effective.

10. You Need Press

Ever wonder why some brands always seem to capture opportunities to act as an expert resource for reporters? Maintaining positive relationships with local media is important, but business blogging could help more than you think. By establishing yourself as a thought leader, you’ll gain some serious visibility, scoring opportunities to speak, present, and give interviews in the process.

11. Your Competitors are Already Doing it

83% of your competitors are creating custom articles, and 71% have made the commitment to business blogging. Let those numbers sink in for just a minute. It’s no longer a newfangled or experimental approach to marketing; it’s quickly becoming the norm. If you don’t make the plunge into creating content soon, you risk being left far behind.

Want to learn more about how to get started blogging? Our free eBook, Blogging for Beginners, is filled with proven tips and inspiration!