3 reasons new brands should consider starting a blog
How blogging can propel your marketing success
It feels a little strange to brag about my blog.
I mean blogging was huge in the 2000s but once social media really took flight, it started dropping off some.
You can essentially microblog on Instagram, so is there any point to a blog anymore?
The answer is a resounding YES!
Particularly for new brands, a blog can really help you achieve your marketing goals much faster than without one.
And my blog is proof of that.
At the time of publishing this post, my business is only nine months old. It's a baby and in the early stages of growth.
I'm still building up the infrastructure and my audience necessary to bring in new clients.
I decided to start blogging to help accelerate my marketing strategy for all the reasons you'll learn about below.
And within the first month, my metrics had increased by a lot!
Organic website traffic was up because more people were finding me through Google.
Visitors were staying on my site longer because I had quality content to offer.
Email open and click-thru rates were increasing since I had great blog content to share.
Social media followers were up with more engagement because again, I was sharing more there thanks to the blog content.
And best of all, the number of inquiries from potential clients went way up!
In the first month of blogging, I had more success in the first 6 months of my business combined.
So why did I start and what led to this success? Get ready because I'm taking you behind the scenes into my business. Here are my top 3 reasons new brands should start a blog:
1. To create a content engine
We talk a lot about content in marketing.
It makes sense. Marketing is all about communicating messages to an audience. Usually with the intent of converting that audience to customers or clients.
Ad we know that you can't just communicate once. You've got to be pushing content out on a consistent basis across multiple marketing channels.
For the District Brand Bar, those channels are my website, my email list, Instagram and LinkedIn.
I was already creating content for my Instagram feed, but that wasn't enough. It wasn't moving the needle for my business.
I needed to build and nurture an email list and bring people to my website so they can see my services and hire me as their marketing and brand coach.
And since most of my work is B2B, I wanted to post high-value content on LinkedIn.
Sidebar: LinkedIn has a high domain authority so search engines like Google are likely to post results from LinkedIn much higher than other websites. That means that your LinkedIn page could rank higher than your website so you want to keep your profile active.
What I needed was a content engine.
Where I can take one piece of content and reuse it, repurpose it and unpack it into multiple different pieces.
My blog is my content engine. The content I create for it is helping fuel the content for my other marketing channels. Instead of always trying to come up with something new to say for social media and my email newsletter, I can now pull from my blog content.
This is the number one reason I started my blog. I wanted to have content that I could consistently post on my marketing channels and send to my mailing list.
It's working great. I write on Mondays or Tuesdays, post that content on my marketing channels Wednesdays or Thursdays, and it all gets sent in my Friday newsletter.
Psst... Do you get my Friday newsletters? Along with great marketing and branding tips, I send a cocktail recipe for your Friday Happy Hours! Sign up here and get my free marketing toolbox.
2. To improve SEO rankings
Search engine optimization (SEO). It's the practice of improving the quality and quantity of visitors to your website based on your search engine results.
You want your website to rank high in the search results of users so that more people will visit your website.
And you also want those visitors to be the ones that are most likely to be your target audience. So while it's great to rank high in any search, what matters most is that you are ranking high in searches using keywords that your target audience is most likely to use when searching for a company like yours.
Blogs are a perfect platform to improve your SEO. The more blog content you create, the more your website will show up in search engines, driving organic traffic to your website.
Additionally, inbound and internal linking is one thing that helps with your SEO success. The more links you have to your web pages, the better the more value search engines place on your website.
These days so many websites are very small in terms of the page size. Especially for a new brand starting out, you may just have one long web page, or maybe three pages in total. I did up until two months ago!
And that's great to get your business off the ground.
But when it comes to SEO, it helps to have other web pages to link to. Now that I have my blog, I can link to other relevant blog posts in my content.
And perhaps someone else will find my post useful and will link to it in their content as well. Having inbound links like that will really help a page rank better.
Of course, you need to make sure that all of your blog content is optimized for SEO. That means choosing the right keywords and using them in your Headings and image descriptions and using adding in those important links. Here's a great post on how to rank higher.
3. To build your brand's authority
Having a blog and consistent content that speaks to the topics you are an expert at can go a long way to building trust and credibility.
While you may already be an expert and an authority on those topics, you need to essentially prove that to others. They need to see proof that you know your stuff.
And the right blog content can do just that.
When you put high-value content on your website. High value meaning tips, tools, resources, insights - content that people can actually use, it builds trust with your audience and establishes your brand authority.
Brand authority can lead to more clients, more partnerships or collaborations, and more publicity. And what business wouldn't benefit from more of those?
Have I convinced you to start a blog for your new brand? Need help getting it off the ground? I help brands craft a marketing strategy that aligns with their brand goals and coach them through all of the steps to implement it. Let's chat!
