Presumably, you’ve entered the market with a new product or service that accommodates your clients’ needs or problems. If that is so, you are going to want your target market to know you and trust you.
Blogging has become one of the most valuable tools startups use to establish, maintain and nurture the relationship with their customers, and it’s clear as to why. In a world of established giants, it can be hard for a startup to be heard. Give your corporate identity a voice by blogging.
Blogging overall is on the rise. According to Statista, there will be almost 32 million bloggers in the US alone.
Image Source: Statista
What exactly makes blogging so useful to startups looking to grow, and how can your business get in on the action and benefit from creating a blog?
According to HubSpot, companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get 3.5x more traffic than companies that publish 0-4 blog posts.
Customers these days expect to find your information where they are, not where you are. Where are they? On social media. As a startup, you should be using the entire web space to make yourself seen. The promotion of your blog on social media; be it a Tweet, Facebook post, LinkedIn share, podcast or Youtube video, can be enhanced by strong industry influencers.
Quality content within your blog will improve the relationship between your new company and your customers. Increasingly shared content will help cast the net far and wide and bring home potential customers, perhaps of another demographic, you haven’t yet conceived. Interest these prospects with your blog, direct them to your site, and watch your company grow.
Growth often means more sales, some of which may be made online via your website. Your blog will help drive traffic to your website. Writing blog posts that strategically contain keywords relating to your company and market will increase the chances of attracting organic search traffic. This in itself, along with user satisfaction is a metric used by Google and other search engines to identify and rank useful content.
To identify low-hanging fruits to write about, use tools like Ahrefs to find high-volume, low competition keywords:
Take a look at some of these keywords. All of them have a relatively low keyword difficulty yet very nice search volume. If you’re running a startup that has anything to do with productivity (e.g. CRM or time management software), these keywords are worth to write about.
High-quality blog posts on topics of interest and relevance to your audience and the wider industry will position your brand as an industry leader in affairs, events and information. With relevance to your industry, make your writing the go-to place for clients, professionals, and academics to find all the information they need. Include interesting posts that your target market are likely to search for. They will affiliate your expertise with your website and proceed to trust and utilise your service for their needs.
Startups looking to grow often need money. The best investors are actively scanning the web for new entrepreneurs and ideas. Creating a high-quality blog, full of interesting and useful content that surrounds and upsells your product, can catch the eye of a potential investor. Investment certainly equals growth, and in this case, it would be all thanks to blogging.
Understand your audience to become a thought leader. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what topics and questions will be searched for by a person at any given time. An active blog that is consistently updated has a higher chance of excelling at this trusty position. Monitor discussions on forums and high-traffic publications to identify trending topics of discussion. This will give you direction through which to generate ideas for your next blog posts – keeping your blog relevant, up-to-date and ranking well in search engines.
Blogging creates a space through which to share your success. Said success isn’t achieved by only one person. Get the whole team involved in the workings of your company blog. From founders to new hires, and engineers- get everyone to blog about topics relating to your culture. By creating and celebrating a sense of team success, you give your company a competitive advantage. 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe that the sharing of achievement across the workplace is important to business success (via Deloitte).
Blogging is equally effective for established and successful companies, who share similar growth aspirations. As a startup, chances are, you don’t have quite the same budget for marketing as those who have already established themselves in the industry. Blogging is a perfectly effective low-budget marketing tool, with the potential to set you aside from the rest.
As one of the lesser expensive tools of markets and undeniably one of the most cost-effective, blogging is the answer to every startup marketing questions. If successful, your company may well find itself in the higher end of earnings in the future, which will enable more costly forms of marketing. When this day comes, you won’t want to abandon your blog. If done correctly, blogging should be incorporated into every marketing strategy no matter the maturity of the company. To establish yourself as an industry leader is one thing, to remain there is another.
[“source=business2community”]