How to use a blog in your marketing strategy

Blogs are everywhere these days – and if you don’t have one you’re missing a great opportunity to connect with your business audience. However, simply writing “something” does not a blog make – you need to be a bit more strategic with how you use your blog in order to reap the most benefit and make it a true part of your marketing plan.

Your blog should have a unified purpose that can extend to various audiences and topics – all in a way related to your business. By keeping topics relevant to your audience and strategizing everything from its tone to posting frequency, SEO strategy, and contributor list, you will have a more direct path to reaching – and engaging – the appropriate target readers. Here are four ways your blog can grow your business.

Communicating with existing clients

Your blog is a great place to discuss product/ service tips and tricks, best practices, upcoming products, and more. Your existing clients will appreciate the “in” to getting more from their patronage while you will help to extend their buy-in and investment.

Positioning your company as a leader

Take the opportunity to contribute unique thought leadership via your blog. Comment on newsworthy items and announce your perspective, give advice on how to approach an industry challenge, and, of course, promote any upcoming events. You’ll position your organization as a thought leader in its space while also driving traffic to your events and offerings, such as webinars, whitepapers, and more.

Drumming up new business to fill the pipeline

Of course every company needs new business – your blog is a great way to find new leads. Beyond those thought leadership pieces, your blog should have a lead capture opportunity – most likely in the way of an opt-in/ subscription option. You might also run a contest or giveaway to bring in leads or simply connect with readers by actively engaging in the comments.

Drive SEO and boost your search ranking

Perhaps one of the best benefits of blogging is the boost you’ll get in search engine results. There’s an entire industry out there dedicated to Search Engine Optimization – or SEO, for short. Though there are very complex algorithms with countless factors that go into them, one thing that does score major points with search engine is frequently published, relevant content – blogs do just that.

Essentially, the more your keywords – or words in your blog posts – match what readers are searching for on the search engines, the better your odds of appearing higher up in the search results. The more frequently the posts, the better your chance of getting ranked for relevancy – not to mention that you also get a bump for newer posts on newsworthy items.

Your blog is a valuable tool within your marketing strategy to grow your business to new and existing clients, but also a powerful way to increase your search engine ranking and boost your site’s traffic. All of these things equate to more leads – which should lead to more conversions.