What’s the point in blogging for a business? That’s a question we’re asked over and over. The idea of a blog for a business that provides IT solutions or office furniture can be a difficult sell. The word blog entered the global lexicon a little prematurely.
When we first heard of blogs when it was still a shortened version of the phrase web log and blogs were limited to stories about the daily lives of the writer. The blog has come a long way since then, but the word still conjures the image of introspective tales told from a coffee house laptop.
When you ask a business owner if they’ve thought about blogging for business, they often ask why people would be interested in the inner workings of a manufacturing company.
Blogging for Business?
As well as reminding experienced digital marketers that we aren’t the center of the online universe, this question also helps us to understand what we do. Blogging for business has become a minimum requirement in online marketing. It’s first on everyone’s list, before you start with social media or email marketing, you need a blog. There are even services, like HubSpot, WordPress and Joomla, that are designed to help you get the most out of a business blog.
Telling business owners and CFOs that they need a blog is something most marketers are great at. What we often forget is to explain the reasons blogging for business is important. We usually use shorthand terms like SEO, website traffic or thought leadership, but does that really explain it?
HubSpot and Marketing People Love
Let’s look at it from another angle. HubSpot give a great one-line explanation of content marketing that covers blogging pretty well too. HubSpot’s tagline is about making ‘marketing people love’. Since blogging is the cornerstone of most content marketing strategies it’s safe to assume that blogging for business is supposed to be marketing people love.
The idea, according to HubSpot, is to create content people are already looking for. If you create content people actually want; you are more likely to be found in searches, you build awareness of your product and you encourage people to buy from you. They talk about connecting with your target market, making them like you and by extension, selling them your product.
What’s the Point?
If we put those factors together we can build a picture of the ‘point’ of blogging for business. According to that description you could list the targets for the blog as follows:
-Brand Awareness
-Customer Engagement
-Brand Loyalty
-Promotion
-Exposure
HubSpot Data
That list certainly fits with a lot of the data HubSpot, and other similar services, provides to users. HubSpot analytics lets you know how much traffic your website is getting and when traffic is down it directs you towards the blog to fix it.
It also provides comprehensive keyword analysis tools that help you understand your appearance in search. All of which fits perfectly into the idea of your blog as a brand awareness/traffic-generating tool.
Of course, they aren’t the only metrics HubSpot analytics provides. Placed squarely alongside the traffic figures are the leads and conversion rates. These, it could be argued, provide an accurate measure of the amount of ‘love’ the blogs are generating.
So, What’s the Point?
If we take a more objective view of those figures though, what HubSpot is telling us is that the most important measures are traffic and leads. Blogging for business’ success appears to rely on your ability to convert traffic into leads. The blogs help to draw in traffic, that traffic is then encouraged to ‘love’ you through the quality of the blog content and they show that ‘love’ by becoming a lead.
And leads, at their heart are potential sales.
Which brings us back to the question, what is the point of blogging for business? You could use marketing shorthand, like thought leadership or SEO. Or you might follow HubSpot’s ideal and talk of marketing people love. When you break it down, blogging for business is the same as everything else in business, it’s all about sales.
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Another good reasons for companies to blog, is to show off the knowledge of their employees and fortify their seat at the head of their industry