11 Benefits of Blog Marketing
More than 75 percent of people on the Internet read blogs these days, as per Statista. This means that whatever you post on a blog has a prospective audience of more than 3 billion people. It not only helps the people who come looking for solutions to the topics that one may be blogging about, but also the one blogging. It does not matter whether you are an individual blogger/influencer, a brand or a company offering a product or a service. Different brands and marketers are able to gain insights into customer preferences through various tools in addition to the many other benefits of blog marketing.
Here are some of the benefits of blog marketing that will inspire you to start a blog for your brand today!
- Advertisement in the opposite direction:
Direct advertising can sometimes be very on-the-face and irritating.
Most of the users end up ignoring the advertisements because they are being force-fed to them. All of us have been exposed to direct advertising at one point or the other in our lives.
However, when it comes to writing a blog and marketing it, all you are doing is helping users find you when they need you. Let’s look at an example. Say you need to find the top lifestyle blogs so you do a Google search.
You get these results. Now the important thing to note is that these bloggers did not force themselves on you but instead, they just helped you reach them when you were actually looking for them. It doesn’t take more than common sense to understand that people will be more interested in what you have to offer when they come to you instead of when you reach out to them.
So basically, blog marketing works as an advertisement for your brand but in a direction that works better for your consumers. This is a highly beneficial proposition and many brands that use this proposition are able to register themselves in the minds of consumers for a long time.
- Create an in-depth understanding of products and services
Blogging is a great platform to share experiences.
We all know that!
What’s great for companies, brands, and individual bloggers is that they can establish a deeper understanding of their work through blogs, which is difficult in any other form of marketing communication. This is a great way of indirect sales, which includes showing and telling and integrates them to form a strong selling point.
People expect advertisements to be short, crisp, and entertaining. While designing any form of marketing communication copy, a brand is expected to convey its utility within a matter of a few seconds. A newspaper advertisement, a magazine feature, a social media copy, all these forms of advertising are expected to be short and engaging.
But what a blog marketing does for a brand is to create an experience for every prospective customer who has not used your product or service yet. It creates a more meaningful and deeper engagement with existing customers while also equally attracting the attention of prospective customers and audiences.
Instead of directly persuading them to buy your products and services, you are engaging with them. In the three stages of decision making, namely awareness, consideration, and action, you can help the audience reach the second position.
As you will see in the example below, even a company like General Electric (GE) is trying to be more transparent and engaging through blog marketing.
- Builds trust and credibility
Do you trust every brand you use?
Unlike any other forms of brand marketing, blog marketing helps the customers or the potential customers develop an understanding of your brand, your products, services and the research that has been done in the field.
Let us look at the General Electric (GE) blog:
This is one company that has invested in blog marketing even when it already had the trust and credibility of millions of customers worldwide. Their blogs are related to technology, innovation, latest company news and company experiences. GE Reports blog is one of the best examples of what blog marketing does to the reputation of a brand.
Now if it is working for a successful and well-established company, one can not help but trust how beneficial it would be for small and medium companies at a time like this. You can establish the credibility of processes, safety measures being followed for the employees and even success stories of customers who use your products and services.
- Establish the position of leadership and authority
Who wouldn’t aspire to become a leader in their field of choice and expertise?
Once you are able to establish credibility and domain knowledge, you can become a go-to for any learning requirements that people may have. People start looking up to you for creative ideas in the niche that you work in, which is similar to being a virtual leader and influencer.
For instance, if you start a cooking blog, you may spend years developing it, following the best practices, engaging with the readers, inspiring people to try out new recipes. Once you have reached a certain level, your readers will start building loyalty and return to you for new recipe suggestions and ideas. Some of them will also inspire their friends and family to check out your blog.
All the efforts that you had put in for blog marketing have now paid back as your brand is now in a position where it can lead many people to act in a certain way.
- Opportunity for co-creation
The times that we currently live in, the content space is often said to be driven by co-creation rather than competition. Many brands and influencers have been getting together to co-create content. While professional co-creation has been there for a while, brands co-creating with customers has been a trendy aspect of the benefits of blog marketing.
Given the aspect and width of opportunities that blog marketing offers, a brand can invite ideas from customers to make something together. It is not only entertaining, engaging, and fun for the audience, it can also help the brand understand the customer priorities and requirements in a better manner.
Here is a brilliant example of co-creation by Made.com
With minimal efforts from the customers, they have used their best practices to engage with them and help them understand what they need and like.
Wouldn’t you want to design your own furniture that matches your style and personality?
How easy would it be to play this fun game and engage with the brand to get exactly that?
There is no limit to what you can establish and accomplish with co-creation. But that is only a benefit of successful blog marketing.
- A platform for direct interaction with customers
Through the comments section, you can exactly hear what your customers are trying to tell you. Now, this can turn out either way. It can be an opportunity for you to improve your engagement or it can also negatively affect your brand image.
Don’t worry, you can always manage what shows on your blog and what doesn’t.
However, if you want to build a long-term relationship with your customers, it is a good idea to engage with them as authentically and as consistently as possible.
- Driving traffic
Once your blog gains initial momentum through consistent blog marketing, it will start to attract more traffic organically to it. If more and more people start to find your content interesting and/or useful, they will start to visit the blog regularly to check the updates. They may also start sharing your blog links with other people, including close friends and family.
However, most of this largely depends on the kind of content you are creating as well. Obviously, blog marketing is incomplete without authentic, original, unique and quality content.
Let’s check out a few examples of what types of blogs attract traffic through blog marketing:
Both these brands target very different audiences and niches but have successfully been able to drive traffic to their blog through content and blog marketing.
What more? You can also collect email addresses of people who are interested in getting regular updates of what is new on your blog. There are various tools that can help you track the progress of your blog and send regular updates to followers and keep them engaged. Ensure to have effective CTAs.
- Obtain leads
Old lead generation tools are getting boring and slow.
One of the fastest ways to generate leads with the best conversion rates is through blog marketing.
You’re smart if you already know that this traffic that is driven to your website through blog marketing is a direct prospect of sales. Within this traffic are the people who will choose to follow you regularly, engage with you on various platforms and then go through all the stages of buying to establish sales.
You can use these leads as a focus area for your engagement. These leads could be derived from people who communicate through the comments section of the blog, or through the people who directly sign-up on the blog for regular updates.
- SEO for the website
When you have enough blog content on your website, you can easily focus on on-page and off-page Search Engine Optimization.
Here is a list of results that appear when you google “Best psychology books”. These websites have used blog marketing to optimize search engine rankings through their blogs.
Now, this is just one example of the topics you can start a blog about. Various tools will help you through the process of SEO of your blogs and improve the rankings of your website to reach the user faster!
- Index rankings
In addition to building a community for your products and services, blogs also help you get ranked on Google Index if you get the blog marketing tactics right.
Once you publish a blog, it stays there on the web for an infinite lifetime. Think of it in this way. Your blog posts keep compounding and your interest rate from blog marketing keeps on increasing with the increase in your investment.
Getting ranked and being a part of the index online ensures continued traffic, which can turn into constant lead generation as well.
- Long-term results
The long-term results that can be achieved from the various benefits of blog marketing are immeasurable. There can be a separate blog on the topic.
Imagine this:
You’re sipping coffee in a cafe, or you are travelling for a work-trip.
The blog you wrote a month ago is still working its magic through the tools and rankings of the Google Index. Whenever someone searches for a popular keyword that you used in your blog for SEO, your blog will be on the top of the Google rankings, engaging with the reader on your behalf.
Or, imagine this:
You have successfully marketed your tech-review blog and now you are earning a stable regular income through affiliate marketing.
Here is a great example of different types of blog marketing on Techradar.com. This blog is reviewing the latest technology products while reaping the benefits of blog marketing through Amazon affiliate marketing program and google advertisements.
These are not just imaginary scenarios you need to make up in your head! You can bring this imagination to reality through the multiple long-term benefits of blog marketing. Enhance your brand identity, add value to customers, and establish a consistent source of income through blogs.
Conclusion
The benefits of blog marketing are immense. One can never explain the short-term and long-term benefits of blog marketing enough. It is a greatly rewarding process but rewards require hard work. Creating and establishing a successful and popular blog takes time, effort, and consistency. The world of blog marketing is out there, waiting for you to explore it and make the most of the benefits of blog marketing as are possible. Start today, start with one step and before you know it, your blog would start paying you more than what you invested in it in the first place.