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Getting started with Business Blogging for Marketing

Getting started with Business Blogging for Marketing

The Benefits of Business Blogs for Marketing

If the whole world of business blogging is a mystery to you, here’s a few thoughts to hopefully demystify what it is & make the case for why you should use blogging as a very cost effective marketing tactic.
What is business blogging?

Sounds complicated but it’s not. Put simply, business blogging involves creating short form content posted to your website about a particular subject, to help you increase your “online visibility” i.e. making it easier for you to be found on the internet.

Why should you use blogging as a marketing tactic?

  • It helps drive traffic to your website
    If your like me, you want to find cost effective ways to drive more visitors to your website. Yes, you could rely on people typing in your name right into their browser, but typically the people that do this already know you. You could pay for traffic through purchasing email lists but often this is illegal, or by placing paid ads, but both can be quite expensive. So, how can you cost effectively drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines.
    Keeping your website fresh & relevant can be challenging. Think about it, when did you last change, add new, or refresh your website pages? If your like most businesses it’s not an every day occurrence! Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which makes it easier for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in any organic search.
    Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — expanding your potential audience.
  • It helps convert that traffic into leads
    In the same way that every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads by simply adding a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post to things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials …
  • It helps establish authority & credibility
    Customers are interested in content that answers their common questions. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes.
    If prospects find answers to their common questions via your blog posts they’re much more likely to:
  1. Come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past.
  2. Enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer.

So Blog posts also help move the sales process along more swiftly.

I hope these thoughts encourage you to either start a business blog or make this a larger part of your marketing strategy.

Author Derek Findlayson

The small trick to better business – your staff’s thumbs up

The small trick to better business – your staff’s thumbs up

Wouldn’t it be great if everything you did got a great big thumbs up from your employees? Then of course, we’d have nothing to complain about! The great thing about the real world of business is that your employees do push back against decisions that you make, consciously or not. Some of these aren’t always that helpful (we all have that employee who is convinced you don’t see him slink into the office at 9:07am every day with a Starbucks in hand…). The good news is some of the things that staff push back against are great warning signs.

Many of the businesses we help are in the middle of planning a business strategy, perhaps revising an existing plan, rejigging one, or looking at creating a new plan.
One massive mistake we see is that sometimes these plans are not run through the staff until they have been set in stone, shipped and delivered. There are 2 reasons why this is a bad idea.

The first one is that your staff will definitely have some clear ideas about what will and won’t work. Bearing in mind that process management, planning, KPI reporting and many other business functions are a top down initiative; getting buy in for the process is critical.Here are some oversights we have seen in businesses before:

  • Duplication of effort –Multiple spread sheets, online reporting systems, email reports and meetings
  • Product failures not identified – poor competitor & customer research
  • Technical issues and software failings not being identified early enough

…And we could go on.

The key feature here is that asking the right employees in your business key questions before you get to the stage of signing off your latest business plan / new guidelines.

The second mistake is that staff buy in is so critical.

Even if they were ignored when they were asked about the latest initiative, the right leaders and managers in the business being consulted can produce a culture of trust which in turns leads to the initiatives having a much stronger chance of succeeding if they do need to live and breathe on the sales floor.

So – homework for you – what can you ask from your employees today that will potentially have a real effect on your processes and procedures?

We hope you get some interesting answers!

Speak to us today about changing your strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.

Author derek Findlayson