Don’t overlook the value of blogging for small businesses. It can be a relatively easy, inexpensive channel for your local marketing strategy. For instance:
- According to WordPress, over 409 million people view blog posts every month.
- 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post.
- 37% of marketers feel that blogs are the most important channel for content marketing.
Let’s look at the benefits of blogging for small businesses and how the Surefire Local Marketing Platform can help you maximize your efforts.
Importance of Blogging for Small Businesses
Reason 1: Helps in ranking in local search results
Fresh, relevant content is a key factor in local SEO, so a blog will help improve your website’s search result ranking. For instance, Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages than websites without blogs. List keywords, topics, and categories you want your business to rank for and use them to build your blog content.
Reason 2: Helps inform your current and potential customers
Blogs can help you inform current or potential customers about developments with your business — for example, new services, policy changes, or special promotions. By building a strong blog following, you’re essentially creating a private inbound advertising and public relations platform for your business.
Reason 3: Positions your business as a thought leader
Writing well-reasoned blogs about issues related to your industry will help establish you as an authority in your market. You’ll become a go-to source for customers when they have questions.
Reason 4: Increases brand awareness
Blogging can help create a community around your brand. It allows you to spread the word about your company’s products or services. You can share your brand’s story, create long-lasting engagement with customers, and attract new visitors.
Reason 5: Build your audience through collecting emails
By adding a “subscribe” button, you can turn your blog into a way for collecting emails of potential prospects. You can then add these self-qualified leads to your marketing funnel, so they’ll continue to receive communications and promotions about your business.
Reason 6: Increases your overall online presence
By posting relevant blogs, you’re creating an opportunity for your audience to share it with their network and boost your online presence. And remember, the more touchpoints you have with a customer, the greater the chance you’ll have of them converting.
Reason 7: Helps drive traffic to your website
One of the main reasons business owners start a blog is to help drive traffic to their website. As Forbes Magazine points out, businesses with blogs receive 55% more traffic than businesses that don’t blog.
6 Pillars of a Successful Small Business Blog
Successfully blogging for small businesses depends on writing quality content. Your goal is to build trust by being a dependable source of information. To help prospects understand your business, values, products, and services.
Here are the six pillars that will create a solid foundation for your blog:
- Place education at the forefront — Consumers like to be informed, so help provide content that helps them stay in the know. For instance, publish a monthly or weekly roundup about industry developments.
- Showcase successful customer stories — 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know. Make sure your blog builds your social proof by sharing stories about the work you’ve completed around your local community.
- Answer questions you know your customers are asking — Use blogs to answer common questions from your current customers AND create actionable content that can engage new prospects who have similar questions. With the advent of Voice Search, you want to make sure that you’re providing clear, direct answers using conversational language. This will help your answer be the one the search engine selects to read to the user.
- Publish new content consistently — You don’t have to have a perfect posting streak, but the more you blog, the easier it will be. Studies show that businesses that publish around 16 blog posts per month (roughly four posts per week) received almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that publish between zero and four per month. Establishing a posting schedule to keep things on track.
- Make it visual — Humans have a short attention span, so adding media like images or videos can help viewers stay engaged with your blog post. It also helps them retain key points. People retain 65% of information when relevant visuals are paired with written content, vs. only 10% when there isn’t a visual element.
- Include calls-to-action to learn more — A blog can help you advertise if you do it the right way. For instance, research shows that roughly 80% of business purchasers prefer to see an advertisement in the form of a series of articles over a direct sales pitch. Instead of “buy now,” use alternative call-to-actions that invite readers to learn more. For example:
- Sign up for a newsletter
- Download a whitepaper
- Book an appointment
Simplifying Your Online Presence
Surefire Local Marketing Platform makes it easy for you to manage your small business blog. It removes the hurdle of working with additional tools and having to learn how to use them.
From a single platform, you can easily write content, save drafts, send blogs to a team member to review and/or approve, schedule content out in advance.
It comes with a website hosting platform (like WordPress) to publish your content. Moreover, it has tools like Google Analytics built-in, so you can see how much traffic your website is receiving, from what sources (organic, social, etc.) and from which blog posts.
Surefire Local Marketing Platform streamlines your workflow since you can manage your blog in the same place as your paid ads, local business listings, online reviews, social media, website traffic, and more.
Request a Demo to See the Surefire Local Marketing Platform in Action
Surefire Local provides local marketing software to help small businesses execute hyper-local digital marketing to attract customers, grow profits, and maximize efficiency.
Get started today by requesting your free demonstration and see how the Surefire Local Marketing Platform will let you take control of your local marketing!
