Businesses operate in an ever-changing landscape of technology, marketing, and customer demands. While having a user-friendly and optimized website is essential for a comprehensive online marketing strategy, it might not be enough to engage and communicate with customers effectively. This is where social media and blogging come into the picture.
We all know the vast power of social media: over 3,5 billion people worldwide use one or more of the most popular social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. However, 77% of all Internet users read blogs, which equals almost as many people as all social media users combined. There are over 500 million blogs on the Internet, and two new blog posts are published every second! Clearly, there is demand for this kind of communication and if you haven’t joined this club yet, you definitely want to consider starting a blog as it offers a number of benefits. The five most important areas that a quality blog can support are content creation, SEO (search engine optimization), credibility, value, and traffic. Let’s break it down a bit more.
Content creation is often a struggle for businesses: what, when, where, and how to share, particularly if you’d like to distribute longer pieces of information. A blog is a great platform to showcase your expertise and knowledge with your customers about the industry you’re in or other relevant interest areas. Blog posts are also easy to repurpose on your social media channels and easy to share.
SEO’s or search engine optimization’s goal is to make your business visible above your competition in search engine results. One way to do so is to write blog posts around keywords that your customers search for because not only your readers but also search engines love fresh, relevant content. Blogging is a straightforward and inexpensive method to boost your website’s SEO.
Credibility is a biggie. Why, you might ask. Well, when you go looking for a service or product, you’d like to make sure that you’ll pick the best possible option. If the company you’re thinking of purchasing from seems to be an industry expert with a genuine intention to serve its customers, you’ll feel a lot more confident in your decision. A blog filled with useful information helps businesses do just that.
Value is the core of the modern business. People don’t like to follow overly salesy brands since a bunch of sales posts don’t really attract attention or interest. What they really want is a better customer experience than what your competitors can provide. Without trying to sell anything, you can give your customers something valuable for free before they make a purchase or a commitment, in hopes that this piece of information will lead them in choosing to make a purchase on their own.
Traffic is the holy grail every business is after. Of course, there are several strategies that can help you do this, like PPC ads, affiliate networks, and social media ads, the ultimate goal is to maximize the amount of organic traffic you drive to your site from search engines. Every time you upload a new blog post to your website, you are increasing the number of your indexable pages, meaning you’re creating an opportunity for your business to show up on the search engines.
You can now see that blogging can clearly add value to any business; however, it’s crucial to choose the right platform to do so. You don’t want to spend hours styling your blog posts and deal with HTML or CSS formatting. It’s best to have a platform that’s easy to operate, user-friendly, and helps you get the job done. You likely want to include photos or infographics, schedule the posts in advance, send an email about the new posts to your subscribers and so on, therefore a platform that can handle all this without a programmer’s help comes in handy. If you’re currently on the lookout for such a platform, consider requesting a free Liferay demo to see which aspects of blogging it can help with.
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