Blog content creates a funnel
It can be hard to make your business stand out in a crowd of competitors, and it's getting more difficult all the time. While it’s clear that growing your online audience and finding ways to connect with your target consumers is vital in today’s busy digital marketplace, with so many marketing channels to choose from, you may have difficulty determining the best strategy to take. Have you ever thought about blogging for business?
Many small business owners don’t realise the benefits of a blog on their website. Blogging for business is an effective way to boost your brand awareness and build relationships with your target audience. By consistently publishing quality content on your blog, you are able to provide more value for leads and customers, which can in turn lead to improved conversions, higher sales, and better customer retention.
Another point to take in mind when using blog content to influence conversions is how you will engage consumers throughout the buyer’s journey. It’s not a secret that your end goal is a conversion, but you need to engage customers at each step in the marketing funnel if you want them to change from visitor to lead and lead to customer.
What is marketing funnel?
The marketing funnel is a process of turning leads into customers, as understood from a marketing (and sales) perspective. The idea is that you need to cast a broad net to capture as many leads as possible, and then slowly nurture prospective customers through the purchasing decision, narrowing down in each stage of the funnel.
Many marketing gurus split the funnel into different parts, but there are generally three points that you need to remember:
Top of the funnel (ToFu) aiming to grow brand awareness and site traffic. ToFu content grabs attention.
Middle of the funnel (MOFU) puts focus on lead generation and nurture. MOFU content educates and informs.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) works on conversion to paid service or product. BOFU content is personalised and product focused.
Content at the top of the funnel has very little to do with your products and services, and everything to do with your buyer’s interests and needs. In this article, we will cover one of the main ToFu tactics to reach a wide pool of potential customers - BLOG.
Blogging is one of the oldest players on your content marketing team – yet it remains a powerful engagement tool for businesses across industries. Doesn’t matter if you are a small business or a multinational company, blogging is integral to your online content marketing strategy. You’re asking why? Let's dive deeper into the benefits of a blog.
1. Blogging drives more traffic to your site
Every business is looking for ways to drive more traffic to their website. Though there are paid strategies that can help you do this, such as PPC ads and Google Display ads, the goal is to maximise the amount of organic, traffic to your site from search engines like Google.
The only way to boost organic traffic is to focus on proven search engine optimisation strategies like blogging for business. The consumer likes to find lots of great content that they can read and learn from, but it’s also important to note that search engines also rewards frequent blog posts. Each time that you create a new blog post on your website, you are adding to the number of indexable pages that your website has. So the more posts you create, the more pages of quality content you have for search engines like Google to scan and index. This means that you are giving your brand yet another opportunity to show up on the search engines and rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). Moreover, blog posts improves your opportunity to receive more inbound links (links to your content from other sources). In addition to improving your SEO inbound links also increase your chances of being discovered by visitors to other sites.
2. Blogging builds trust within your target market
Blogging is one of the main ways to deepen the connection with your customer. Blogging is a great way to build trust within your target market and work to support and grow these customer relationships. Use this. Build trust by being a source of information. Consumers like to be informed, and appreciate that you are taking your time to teaching them.
Building relationships is a vital part of increasing conversion rates and influencing repeat sales. The reason why blogging is such an effective relationship building tool is that blog content provides real value for consumers. It doesn’t tell consumers to buy something like traditional marketing, it helps consumers understand why they need the product or service and how it can add value in their lives.
3. Business blogging helps your brand build authority
By providing quality content that offers valuable insight and information on important industry topics, your business can work to show consumers that your business is expert in its field. While it takes time to become an authority the payoff can be significant. The more closer your blog posts address the needs of your customers, the more likely your audience will be to trust your business and turn to you when they are finally ready to make a purchase.
4. Engagement
Business blogging also helps create bigger engagement with your brand, which is a sign of trust. If you help consumers better understand their challenges and needs through quality blog content, you encourage them to speak directly to your brand when they need a solution. If they trust your business, they’ll be more likely to buy from you now and in the future.
Blogging for business is a great way to boost your reach online and build stronger relationships with your customers. The more content you produce over time, the more opportunities you have to get new leads and influence more conversions. Don’t expect quick results, blogging takes time to work its magic but it pays off in the end by helping your business drive both new and repeat sales and move people from awareness of your product to satisfied customer of your business.
