The Power of Blogging (Why Every Company Needs a Blog)

Company websites need blogs. Not only do customers expect company sites to feature blogs, but blogs also can be powerful online assets. If your business doesn’t yet have a blog, here’s why every company needs one — including yours.

Drive More Website Traffic

Blogs are known to increase website traffic, growing visits by 55 percent according to one study. They’re particularly adept at increasing site traffic for a few different reasons:

• Blogs can be written about virtually any topic, so companies can target specific queries and longtail keywords that users search
• Blogs that cover a topic well can garner relevant and authoritative links, helping to improve a website’s backlink profile
• Blogs can have internal links with any desired anchor text, so companies can use carefully selected terms when linking landing pages and product/service pages
• Blogs grow to contain a large amount of content, making them the foundation of many content marketing strategies
• Blogs can be disseminated on social media, possibly garnering likes, comments and shares for a company’s social profiles

Few other strategies will grow website traffic as well. Blogs also sustain their traffic growth, slowly accumulating more and more views as the number of posts goes up.

Also, it is possible to track and analyze the effectiveness of a blog in generating leads using Google Analytics, which can provide invaluable insights into visitor behavior and engagement. Getting help with Google Analytics can significantly enhance a company’s ability to leverage the power of a blog to grow its customer base and increase revenue.

Educate Viewers on Product Use

Many companies write blog posts about how to use their products/services. This is an especially fertile subject. 

No one knows more about a product than the company that offers it, and prospective and current customers frequently have questions. Blog posts written about how to use your company’s product are multi-purpose. They can:

• Show customers potential use cases, thus possibly expanding the prospective customer base
• Quell customers’ concerns and fears, thus breaking down barriers that are preventing prospective customers from purchasing
• Answer current customers’ questions, thus reducing the number of inquiries that are sent to customer service
• Demonstrate how customers can get more out of a product, thus making the product more valuable

One company blog that educates viewers especially well is the Tailor Brands blog. 

Blog posts such as How to Start a Small Business, How to Create a Brand Story From Scratch, and Branding a Clothing Line explain how Tailor Brands’ services fit within a company’s establishment or branding. These posts don’t delve into the specifics of the company’s services, but rather how those services fit alongside other aspects of running a business. This is particularly important when a service is one of several that businesses might need.

Blog posts such as Types of Logos, What Makes a Good Logo, and The Meaning of Logo Colors much more specifically help customers make better use of the company’s services (particularly its logo maker). This is particularly important for companies, such as Tailor Brands, that offer some level of a DIY solution.

Increase Leads

Everything that’s put into a blog is ultimately invested with a single aim — grow leads. The increased traffic and engagement that blogs provide do just that. 

A blog brings in potential leads that many other lead generation methods can miss. Visitors who search longtail queries that blogs address might not land on a product/service page. They might not be in a database for purchase. They might not read filtered emails. But they do read a blog. 

Everyone who reads a company’s blog is interested in the company to some degree, and thus a lead. Visitors are leads that other methods of lead generation could miss.

Gain Conversions

More leads create more conversions. Closing blog posts with a hard sell will likely have extremely low conversion rates. Softer calls to action can convert well, though. Blogs are excellent ways to generate contacts, email subscriptions, contact information, or landing page views.

Conversions such as these won’t immediately lead to sales, but each conversion brings a visitor one step closer to becoming a customer. Having more conversions will inevitably grow sales in the future.

Establish Authority

Longform blog posts that cover topics at length can help establish a company’s authority. Not everyone will read a multi-page blog post with minute details and extensive citations. Those who do are likely high-quality leads, though, and everyone who sees such a blog will be impressed.

In other words, blogs grant companies and professionals a medium through which they can demonstrate their expertise. Lectures and books do this too, but blogs are much easier to get started with.

The Ark Invest blog shows how authority can be established. The normative post is 5,000+ words, 50+ citations, and 12+ charts/tables. These are tombs that make the standard short blog post look like a Post-It.

By investing so much into education through blogs, Ark Invest and its founder Cathy Wood have become regarded within the investment world. The firm has extensive institutional investments, and is also a favorite among many retail traders. The reputation has come largely from open-source educational resources, such as the blog’s articles.

Share Company News

Blogs are one of the few mediums where companies can brag without offending or seeming conceited. A blog is widely considered an appropriate place to share exciting news about a company. It’s also a particularly good way to share news, since the news can be slanted or phrased however a company would like to.

For companies that regularly have updates, a blog can be composed solely of company news. Some companies make their blog only about awards, achievements and updates. Other companies maintain a primary general blog, but then also have a secondary blog for company news.

Marcus Investments has an example of a dual-blog strategy. The company has a main blog called Insights, where posts analyze income strategies, taxes, investments, etc. There’s a second blog aptly named called Press Room/News that covers company updates.

A news blog can be reposts of press releases, or it can be company-written posts.

Established a Company Voice

While everything that a company publishes contributes to the company’s voice, few written assets have the impact that blogs do. The length and frequency of blog posts make a blog one of the most influential assets that contribute to company voice. The sheer volume of words has an appropriately sized impact.

Moreover, the impact isn’t just on visitors as they read posts. Employees and writers also become more familiar with a company’s voice as they compose multiple posts. This can help employees develop a company’s voice, and/or better adjust their personal writing for the desired voice.

Sustain Growth

Blogs literally grow in post count, and they become more valuable as they grow. New posts continue to expand a company’s content library, thus presenting all the advantages that new content offers. Old posts can remain high in search results, continuing to garner visitors. 

Don’t expect a quick return on what’s invested into a blog. Companies that consistently sustain their blogs are often extremely happy with the long-term return on investment, however.

Create a Company Blog

If your company doesn’t yet have a blog, creating one is a sizeable yet worthwhile investment. Publish your first post today (or tomorrow after writing it), and you’ll reap the rewards as you publish more in the coming weeks, months and years.