If you have an online business and aren’t taking advantage of content marketing, you’re missing out on a significant portion of potential traffic. Every day, users make billions of queries on Google and other search engines. This traffic is a goldmine for your business, and all it takes to tap into it is a blog.
Blogging has been popular for many years and for good reason — the format is engaging and very shareable on social media. People love to read web content that answers relevant questions and presents information in an appealing, media-rich way. Blogs can effectively reach the traffic that your business can’t, because the articles on a blog can match exactly to the keywords and answer questions that people are actively search for.
When users search for your product specifically, they find your page, but what if they search for something more generalized but related to your product? If you sell televisions, for example, will searchers find your page when they look for information about the difference between a liquid crystal display (LCD) or a light-emitting diode (LED) display?
This is the opportunity that content marketing presents.
If your content is related to their search then you can be the authority that answer their question while referencing your products. Suddenly, that user is thinking about buying from your business. Having a content marketing strategy in place allows you to build brand awareness by reaching the customers who may not know your business exists, and this is a cunning way to sidestep larger and more established competitors who aren’t using a blog to reach these audiences.
Of course, expanding your reach isn’t the only benefit of having a blog. Posting quality articles also helps to encourage other websites to link to your domain and this increases the authority of your website in the eyes of search engines, like Google. Backlinks are a sign of endorsement from one website to another, and one of the many ranking signals used by search engines to rank your website on their results pages.
Users who read your blog may even share your posts on social media, providing another free source of additional traffic. Something that’s not always easy to do if you website merely consists of product pages. In most cases, product pages don’t perform very well in social media when compared to articles that are rich in multimedia. Content marketing bridges the gap and allows you to reach this audience. Selling a product like paint? Share eye-catching tutorials of how your product can be used to create incredible spaces! Users will see this and consider using your brand to replicate those results.
The conversions made possible by blogging are predominately customers that you wouldn’t have otherwise reached, but this form of marketing is also highly beneficial for keeping your existing customers engaged and frequenting your website. This gives you the chance to both up-sell to your current customers while maintaining a high level of brand loyalty. You can even use this strategy to gain subscriptions for your email marketing campaigns. Try providing a checkbox option asking the user if they want to be informed of new products when they subscribe to blog updates and watch as you gain the ability to market your product updates directly into their inboxes.
Website traffic is notoriously difficult to acquire, and if you want your business to succeed in today’s online landscape, content marketing with a blog is one of the easiest and best ways to improve your odds of success. You can make your business available to related markets and tap into a wellspring that many of your competitors are ignoring.
conNot sure how to get started? We would be more than happy to help you get your blog off the ground. Whether it’s content strategy, adding a blog to your website, or content creation, we can help. Give us a shout today!
