5 reasons why a blog is the perfect marketing tool
Blogs: An indispensable tool for attracting and retaining customers
Attracting new customers is always a challenge, but the blog remains important alongside many other channels.
Acquiring new customers is an ongoing and constantly evolving challenge for digital marketers. With so many marketing channels available, the choice can seem overwhelming. One medium that should definitely not be overlooked is blogs.
GoDaddy’s Data Observatory on digitalization shows that 70 percent of small business owners in Germany use a website, online store or e-commerce platform as their main sales channel. Increasing customer loyalty is one of the biggest challenges for small businesses – and this is exactly where a blog can help.
While a blog may be a big investment, it provides a wide funnel that can bring new customers into the business via Google at any time. In addition, a blog is a powerful tool for both attracting potential new customers and maintaining contact with existing ones. But how exactly does it work?
Index
1. Convey specialist knowledge
Although specialist knowledge can also be presented on social media platforms, the content is perceived as more trustworthy via a blog. Anyone can make a post on social media – a blog post, on the other hand, conveys professionalism and expertise. A blog also offers the opportunity to present your own expertise in more detail: In contrast to social media, which have restrictions on the number of images, video minutes or text length, a blog allows you to freely design your posts.
Social media users open each platform with specific expectations: Videos on YouTube and TikTok, longer content on LinkedIn, and images and videos on Instagram. Each platform is limited by user behavior, while a blog can combine all forms of media.
2. Easy to search and find
How much work would it be to find an Instagram post from a celebrity that you saw a few years ago? Probably rather difficult or very time-consuming, because content on social media is not searchable.
Although some social media platforms have a search function, this is nowhere near as powerful as a search engine. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play, which is the most important function of a blog. Many German small business owners have also recognized this benefit. 47 percent of participants in a survey by GoDaddy stated that they were planning marketing activities to improve their search engine rankings in order to increase their online visibility (keyword online marketing).
A well-written blog post can show up in Google searches and lead the target audience directly to the website for months or even years. Once a blog post is published, it can and should be updated. Blog posts have an incredibly long lifespan and are an unbeatable tool for inbound marketing.
3. The content belongs to no one else
Instagram accounts get hacked or accidentally deactivated, YouTube channels can be demonetized and Pinterest accounts suspended. While every social media account on the internet is potentially at risk – a blog and the website itself is securely owned by the company in question.
Social media can still be used for brand awareness, but it is important to keep in mind that the customer base that has been painstakingly built up there can be lost. It can always happen that you lose access to your account or that platforms are even deleted or banned in a country.
4. The battle for attention has come to an end
On platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, users are always just a swipe away from jumping to the next post. The competition for users’ attention is enormous. When visitors arrive at a website via a search engine instead, they are exclusively connected to this content. And even if they are not yet ready to make a purchase at this point, they develop trust, increasing the likelihood that they will make a purchase in the future. In fact, 79 percent of respondents to a GoDaddy survey said that their website had a positive impact on sales.
In addition, it is much more likely that all target customers have access to the content: Having access to social media platforms requires creating an account, and not everyone has a presence on TikTok or Instagram. Some people only use one platform, or none at all. But what everyone with internet access uses is a search engine!
5. The rule of seven
A website is the heart of the content ecosystem. The most important thing new visitors can do is explore the website. And they can do this if they are offered a variety of content.
This is related to the so-called “rule of seven”, a theory that states that someone needs to have seven touchpoints with a brand before they are ready to make a purchase. So if someone only briefly stumbles across an item on offer on the Explore page of a social network, it is very unlikely that they will buy it immediately. Instead, the person must come into contact with the product more frequently in order to ultimately purchase it.
While these touchpoints take significantly more time on other marketing channels, they are easy to achieve on a website – especially if you can click through different blog posts.
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