Of course, your company needs a blog. In our opinion, the answer would be a definite Yes! Any company needs a blog for a number of reasons. There are so many benefits to having a company blog. “What benefits?” you might ask. Glad you asked – here are just a few.
Blogs let companies of all types and sizes connect with potential clients and build relationships. That is what is known as lead generation. Blogs provide a platform that allows small businesses to ‘show their stuff’. Customers look online for a company to solve their problems. They can find valuable information about your firm’s capabilities and knowledge base through blog content. You can build and support your company brand too.
That said, we’d like to share another perspective from StraightNorth.com, an online marketing firm. They took on the topic of search engine optimization (SEO) in the following article previously posted on their blog. We bring it to you through our ‘Designing Strategies’ blog with their permission.
Another Reason Your Company Needs a Blog – SEO
Is your company thinking about launching a company blog? It’s a big decision. On the plus side, a blog can do wonders for SEO, lead generation, building brand image and strengthening customer engagement. On the negative side, a blog can be time-consuming, hard to maintain and divert resources from other marketing campaigns.
5 Questions to Ask Before Launching Your Blog
To help make your decision, consider these five questions:
- Do we have talented writers available? Blogging requires a lot of writing, so you are going to need on-staff or agency writers at the ready.
- Do our prospects and customers read blogs? If your target audience doesn’t spend much time reading blogs or combing the Internet for business information, your blog may not do enough for lead generation to make the effort worthwhile.
- Will blogging help our SEO campaign? A company blog can benefit SEO in a number of ways, but it can also drain resources from other, better SEO tactics. Go over the SEO implications of a blog carefully with your agency before pulling the trigger.
- What is our content strategy? Company blogs get poor results when content is inward-focused and/or unimaginative. What are we going to write about? Why will potential customers be interested in reading it? How will we get blog subscribers into our conversion funnel? If you don’t have clear answers to these questions, you’re not yet ready to start a blog.
- How will we know if our blog is successful? Like any other marketing program, a blog must have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Useful metrics for blogs include:
- Number of subscribers (RSS and email)
- Number of page views
- Time on page
- Organic traffic
- Referred traffic
- Number of comments
- Number of conversions (form submissions and phone-in)
- Number of social shares
- Quality of social shares
- Organic search visibility of blog content
Author Brad Shorr brings decades of marketing, sales and management experience to the Straight North team as Director of B2B Marketing. He is a skilled SEO copywriter, social media marketer and content strategist.
