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 expertise can be presented on social media platforms, the content of a blog is perceived as more trustworthy. Anyone can post on social media, but a blog post conveys professionalism and expertise. A blog also gives you the opportunity to present your own expertise in more detail: Unlike social media, where there are restrictions on the number of images, minutes of video or length of text, a blog allows you to be creative with your posts.
Social media users enter each platform with specific expectations: Videos on YouTube and TikTok, longer content on LinkedIn, and pictures and videos on Instagram. Each platform is limited by user behaviour, whereas 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 like YouTube or Facebook, users are always a swipe away from jumping to the next post. The competition for users’ attention is fierce. When people come to a website via a search engine, they are only exposed to that content. And even if they are not ready to make a purchase at this point, they develop trust, which increases the likelihood that they will make a purchase in the future. In fact, 79 per cent 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 will be able to access the content: Accessing 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 at the heart of the content ecosystem. The most important thing new visitors can do is explore the site. And they can do that if they are presented with a variety of content.
This is linked to the so-called “Rule of Seven”, a theory which 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 a social network’s Explore page, they are unlikely to buy it immediately. Instead, the person will need to be exposed to the product more often in order to purchase it.
While these touchpoints take much more time on other marketing channels, they are easy to achieve on a website – especially when you can click through different blog posts.
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