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How to Use Blogging to Promote Your Business
When it comes to promoting your brand, I would say there is nothing as helpful as using blogging to promote your business.
It is an easy and effective way. You can establish your brand as an authority, as well as providing value to your customer. All in all with the aim to boost sales, for your product or services. In fact, studies have shown that businesses that focus on blogging sees x13 positive ROI than businesses that don’t.
To help you and your business out, I have collected some tips I picked up along the way while working with blogs for a large company where ROI was key.
I have also created a guide on how to start a design blog that might be of interest to you if you want more information on blogging.
9 Tips to Use a Blog to Promote Your Business
Establish Your Brand and Tone of Voice
Show who you (your company) is on your blog by creating branded content that helps the reader to understand, who you are and what you believe in.
This type of content is good to keep for your audience to understand your mission. The time you spend on this content will also help you to convert better as it is the foundation of your company story, to the outside world.
Show Informality And a Human Aspect of Your Company
Through your blog, you will be able to show the more informal and human aspects of your company.
Tell stories about the people who work there, make people also connect with the “why” and vision from the founder. Also, show behind the scenes of the work it involves creating your product or service.
People are more prone to buy things that have a story and where they feel a connection. Showing a more human aspect of an otherwise static brand is a very good story to paint on your blog and will also help you to promote your business.
Provide Resources Connected to Your Product or Service
Help your customers to educate themself around topics related to what your business offer. You can easily do this by providing free resources which you know your customers will find valuable.
Answer Your Customer Questions
Directly use your business blog to answer customer questions that either you know or have researched.
A tip here is to look at questions you receive by email or if you have a customer support person or team, use these to help to guide your content.
Get PR and Media Coverage
PR and media sites are usually more prone to speak about you or link to you if you are telling a unique story. Or have created something out of value, for example, an industry research report or something in those lines.
If you have a static website it can be more challenging to get this type of coverage. This is where content really works well…
Produce Valuable Guides on How to Use Your Product
To help you to sell more, it is important that your potential customers understand why they should use your product. Create a story that makes them understand what benefit your business will provide. Sometimes it is also important to explain, how-to-do something.
Very often it is important to help your potential customer to see a need for your product. Creating content around this can help your reader but also help you to boost sales.
Create Content That Actually Drives Traffic & Potential New Leads
The opportunity to have a blog means that you will be able to create more content around your specific topic. All this content will help you to attract new people in different ways that are looking for information around that specific topic.
You can do this by doing a proper content and keyword research to focus as much as possible on content that people are actually searching for.
Pinterest and Google are great ways to get “free” traffic from. Tools you can use here is Ubersuggest, Keyword Planner and Google trends amongst some.
If you create content that people are looking for you will automatically with the right optimization drive in traffic to your blog.
The key here is then to make sure you have a proper way of making sure the customer comes back again or converts.
Target Content Pieces With Intent to Purchase Using SEO
Finding new customers is tricky and as a small business online you are depending on your current customer pool but you also need new customers.
My best tip here is to use part of your blog strategy to find commercially high intent keywords that people are searching for on Google. Create content on your blog around these search terms.
SEO traffic usually converts better than Pinterest, which is why SEO is a channel you should be investing in if you want to drive sales.
Create Interviews With Purpose
Depending on the goal of your business, you can use your blog as a tool to connect within your industry.
Set up a series of interviews with people you want to know about you. And start to outreach to see if they want to be part of your interview series.
The impact interviews can have on your small business varies. It might be purely for networking purposes, or a way to get new leads. It also helps your blog to look more professional, as it shows that other experts within your field are showing interest in you.
TIPS!
Important to keep in mind before deciding if you should be using blogging to promote your business, is to be clear on your overall business goal. Your blog should be a reflection of your business goal.
All articles or ideas above should be in line with the overall strategy.
Otherwise, you will most probably be spending time planning and executing with low or little ROI.
With that being said, as you know already on my blog here I do believe in testing and learning as you go. As long as you know why you created something in the first place. Unless there is a huge risk for your business, I always encourage testing – and learning by doing. Sometimes the best content stories come out this way.
Challenges That Can Arise When You Blog for Your Business
- Finding blog ideas to write about
- Time spent on research and content creation (this is where outsourcing could be a smart decision)
- Being consistent with posting content
- Spending more time on content creation than on promoting your content
- Sticking to your blog niche or finding a blogging niche
- Measuring if the content was successful for the goal of the business
- No one reads your blog: It is important to always have a clear KPI to each article or content hubs that you are creating. It is very possible that you are creating awesome content but not promoting it in the proper way. Content creation and promotion go hand in hand and should be planned out together in your editorial calendar.
- Forgetting all along to promote the content – expecting that people will magically find it
- Understanding what your customer finds valuable
All in all, having a blog for your business if used wisely can show great results to your overall business goal.
I hope you found this information about how you can use your blog to promote your business useful.
It is all about painting your business story through content.
Now back to you…
What challenge are you currently feeling that you have around if you should start a blog or not?
If you already have a blog, what tips can you share with us that you have found working well?
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I am Caroline, an ex interior design consultant, turned into a content creator, 30+ something Swedish born with an insane passion and interest for design, blogging, and living a meaningful and creative life. Design to me is about creating a (your) story – it is about understanding what matters and how to create something unique and meaningful which speaks and motivates you.