Having an effective business and branding strategy is one of the best ways to find instant and longterm success with starting a business online. It’s not just about sales, content, or even ROI — it’s about having a way to combat with each of these, while also growing and scaling your business over time.
For example, building a blog for your business could be a great way to stay ahead of the competition and eventually rankings in the search results. Then we also have social media, which allows for increased brand awareness while also giving you the opportunity to become a leader in your respective industry by providing existing and potential customers with highly useful, informative and problem-solving content.
Both blogging and social media are effective methods to grow a brand and business, but they should also be treated differently. The benefits of blogging and social media for business and marketing are all over the place, so we made sure to highlight the best methods and list them for you below.
Developing Brand or Personality
When starting a blog for your business, it’s important to make sure you have a well thought out and branded domain name. You should also be running WordPress and have a great design. Throw a nice high-quality logo into the mix, and you are on your way to finding success.
As blogging allows you to generate online conversations and interactions with existing and potential customers, it can help you build brand or personality like an expert or innovative in the industry. Instead of focusing on 500-word articles and just putting something out there, try to write 1,500+ word articles and make sure they are evergreen, as this will help with new traffic flowing to your site for months to come.
By providing your customers with content that will be viewed as valuable and problem solving too, your customers will see your experience and knowledge you have gained in the field and will feel free to order your products or services.
Strong Customer Trust
As mentioned previously, blogging provides a great way to share knowledge and information about your business and latest trends in the industry, a business can steadily publish informative blog posts to proclaim their authority as an industry leader and expert. The same applies with creating content through social media and to gain trust with your audience as well.
For instance, let’s say you have a business that is focused on “cartier watches“. After searching for some examples, we came across The Watch Company… which has been doing a good job at promoting their company and brand on multiple platforms and variables.
We will touch on their social media marketing later, but now is the perfect time to point out how important it is to have a site design that looks professional and allows you to gain the trust of your audience. This can clearly be seen through their website screenshot below.
Take notice of their logo at the top of the page, the contact information that is easy to find, and also the promotion of their social channels as well. Throw in the easy navigation and assortment of content on their site in relation to the products they are selling, and this is a perfect example to follow.
In short, having a great site design, a trusted brand and blog content all help in building strong trust and confidence in your business or brand that will encourage new visitors and existing customers to buy more from you.
Exceptional Boost to SEO
Search engines want you to upload quality, unique and informative content on your digital assets and blogging is the great and inexpensive way to share unique, relevant and useful content with the target audience.
Again, back to what we mentioned earlier — go for longer content, and not short content just to put something out there. It will be a lot easier to rank something of real value with a lot of resources several times, versus trying to promote a bunch of lesser quality blog posts.
When different search engines receive quality content to index, they assign your business or brand higher ranking in search engines when target keywords are creatively inserted in the blog posts. Consistent blogging helps your business or brand appear in more and more search results whenever internet users search for the products or services you offer.
Blogging along won’t work however, you also need to have an effective content marketing plan in place as well.
Increase Your Brand Reach through Social Media
Blogging is a reliable way to show the personal side of a business or company that customers cannot see via different outbound marketing approaches. It can be used as a great way to give your customers a sense of vision, personality and standards of your business. However, if you are relying simply on SEO and organic traffic, this can take quite a while to accomplish.
With that being said, it would be a huge mistake to discount what social media has to offer — especially Instagram and it’s massive reach to over a billion active users. You can see an example of how TheWatchCompany is using Instagram to create high quality posts and using hashtags to promote their brand and reach new audiences through the screenshot below.
Scheduling in new content and finding the best hashtags to use within your content is something that can be done manually, but there are plenty of automation tools out there to help with this as well. For example, when using an Instagram bot, you can increase your auto likes, follow/unfollow rates, comments, messages, and scheduling out your postings over time.
With so many different social networking platforms out there today, it would be nearly impossible to manage each of them without the help of automation and scheduling tools. And when you throw content creation and blogging into the mix, it becomes even tougher.
One of the best things about creating content through social media and blogs, is that your customers share your blog posts free of cost and validates you as a credible brand or business in the market. The more content you have out there, the more likely you are to see residual benefits month after month.
Strong Relationships with Customers
As customer engagement is one of the most vital elements for ultimate business success, blogging offers you a reliable way to connect with your customers in a most effective and more conversational manner. When they find everything on your blog they need, they are more likely to visit your business blog often that helps you build a strong online presence.
In a recent article on Forbes, they listed the following five characteristics as the most important factors when trying to impress and keep clients/customers.
- Communicate.
- Exceed expectations.
- Ask for feedback.
- Connect.
- Show appreciation.
When it comes to building such relationships through the use of blog content, most business blogs are made with active comment sections where customers can share their feedback and views or can ask things they are confused about. It provides them a convenient way to connect with the business or brand to get their queries resolved quickly.
Implement These Methods to Grow Your Brand and Business Today
A business or brand can use blogging and social media as a way to gather valuable customer data and information by asking them to subscribe to the periodic newsletter of the business. The more you understand about your audience and their needs, the better.
With this information, you can then create better content and ad campaigns to effectively promote your blog, websites, and any products or ads campaigns that you might be running.
Be sure to check through the list of key factors and data points we listed above, then make sure they are implemented into your business today.
