The Benefits of Blogging for Small Businesses
You’ve read a blog. We all have. It might have been about new summer recipes or the best pet products. Hopefully you walked away with more information than you started with, and after all, that’s the point of a blog.
But it’s not the only point. A good business funnels their blog posts to lead readers toward a next step. That next step can be purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or starting a conversation with the business.
Blogging is a great tool for nurturing your prospects. Here’s how it works:
What is Blogging?
Blogging comes in all shapes and forms, but they can be roughly broken into two categories:
Personal blogs for exposure
Startup blogs for businesses
Personal blogs are those written by individuals – think artists, small creators, writers, etc. These blogs tend to be less persuasive and might not seem to work toward a concrete goal. They might be life updates from your favorite author, or something like that.
But business blogs are more structured and move toward a clear end goal. Afterall, the business wants to sell their product or service, and writing blogs without a purpose is a waste of time and energy.
And that’s probably why you’re here: to learn about how to start a blog for your small business or startup. No more dilly-dallying, let’s dive in.
How to Start a Small Business Blog
Business blogging is pretty simple. You know your industry, product, service, etc., and you also know what motivates people to purchase your product or service. Blogging is about informing your readers about the industry and then offer your product or service as a solution.
Let’s run through an example.
Say you’re a personal trainer who offers both in person and online sessions to help people improve their overall fitness.
So, if the service is training sessions to improve fitness, what will motivate the audience to hand over their credit card?
Think like the audience. Maybe they want to lose weight, build muscle mass, or get toned. Maybe it’s a health reason, like they want to live longer to be around their children or grandchildren.
A good way to find out what motivates your prospects is to talk with the clients you already have. Ask them a few questions about why they need your service/product, how did they decide on you?
Once you’ve figured out the driving force behind the purchase, it’s time to reverse engineer that process. And to do that, we have to understand the buyer’s journey.
The Buyer’s Journey and How it Applies to Blogging
The buyer’s journey is fancy marketing terminology. What it really means is “How likely is it that your prospects can turn into paying clients, and how soon will that happen?”
There are three stages to the buyer’s journey:
Awareness
Consideration
Decision
Awareness
Think of the awareness stage like a website. A brand-new visitor to your website has a lot to take in, everything from the home page, services page, blog, etc. etc. They aren’t familiar with the layout of your site yet, so it will take some time to get acclimated.
However, they’re on your site for a reason. And that reason might be because they have inklings of buying a product like yours.
Our job as bloggers is to create content that’s accessible for a wide variety of readers. We want to inform them and nurture them to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
Back to our fitness trainer blog for a moment.
A good awareness stage blog topic would be something like “The Benefits of Staying Fit During Lockdown.” It appeals to anyone stuck at home, no matter their physical health, and it’s content that the wide majority of your site visitors can relate to.
Consideration
So, our once-rookie website visitor has been on your site for a while. They know the navigation, they understand what you’re doing. They’ve read your awareness stage content and like what they see. But they want more in-depth content about their specific issues.
Consideration stage content begins to narrow the focus to start to weed out the visitors that aren’t interested in your product or service and to provide more relevant information for visitors that are interested.
A great consideration stage blog topic would be something like “The Lockdown Weight Loss Challenge: Using an Online Fitness Coach to Reach Your Goals.”
We’ve solidified an issue here – weight loss
We’ve set up a pitch for your service – online fitness coaching
We’ve sprinkled in some motivation – reaching your goals
Decision
Fewer prospects reach the decision stage than the consideration stage, so that really separates who’s motivated to throw money at you and who’s not.
When writing decision stage content, you can stand to be a bit more…salesy. You’ve probably mentioned your product/service to your readers before, so decision stage readers will get what you’re doing.
The goal is to recap all the positive points you’ve made in the past about your offerings and wrap them up with a bow. Make your readers enthusiastic about buying from you, but also make it seem like a necessity. Something they can’t live without.
A good blog post for decision stage readers would be something along the lines of “What to Look for in an Online Fitness Coach.”
The topic can be more about your product/service than about anything else. Ideally, you won’t need more than two or three decisions stage posts to get the point across.
Startup Blogs in a Nutshell
Blogging is a long process, as I’m sure you’ve gathered. It can take months to ramp up to writing decision stage content and be able to close clients from it. Blogging is one of those double-edged swords. You won’t see a substantial return on investment for a while, but all the content you’ve created and published on your site helps boost traffic and improves your standing with search engines.
If you’re looking to start sending out contracts and shipping orders, email marketing might be more your style.
Blogging is for the patient and the passionate. It’s for people that believe their product or service is really great at helping people solve problems, and they want to let the world know!
If you’re interested in what goes into developing a blogging strategy, or just want to chat about nifty blog writing tactics, feel free to reach out!