6 Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a Blog

Having a blog is one of the most basic and simplest things you can create to establish your business and brand as an authority in your industry. It’s the very foundation for building your entire online presence.

In this blog post, we’ll go through the most important reasons your company needs a blog and what it can help you achieve…

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Reason #1: Blogging Tells Your Story

Every brand and business has a story. You didn’t simply appear out of nowhere, right? You identified a problem or gap of some sort in the market, you came up with a solution, and you launched your brand to provide that solution and fill in the gap. That’s your story. You can and should bring it into your blog.

Remember…. Stories are meant to be told, to engage your readers, and ultimately to convince them to take action and buy your product or service. How do you do this?

Appeal to Their Emotions

You want to lure your readers in, keep them focused, and convince them that they need what you have.

One way to appeal to your readers’ emotions is by incorporating characters into your story — real people who are relevant to what you’re providing. Now…. don’t make up characters, creating them out of thin air. You want to use real people to communicate:

Important news
Benefits of your product or service
Other information that relates to your brand or business in some way

There’s no need to repeat your origin story over and over again. But do use it as inspiration to tell other stories that are just as impactful.

For example, feature an interview with your founder or other key players within your company on your blog. Go into:

Where did they come from?
What struggles did they overcome to get to where they are?
What problem or set of problems are they helping to solve today?

How to Tell Your Story

As you create your story, keep in mind that there needs to be a clear beginning, middle, and end. This helps your readers identify with the content you feature on your blog and touches on their emotions to inspire them to take action.

You don’t need to work within a formal structure per se, but you do want your story to flow in this manner to make the most sense.

Be careful not to repeat any of your web content within your blog because the point is to engage your readers. By rephrasing existing website content — like from your about page — your blog will fall flat and be boring. That’s not what you’re trying to create here, so avoid this at all costs.

And if you believe you’re a “boring” industry, don’t worry. It’s all about angles and how you present them. So tell a story. This is what your content should do.

Aim to draw your reader’s attention in right from the beginning. Provide them with valuable information throughout and give them a strong sense of understanding by the end.

Reason #2: Blogging Communicates With Your Customers

Are you:

Entering a new market?
Launching a new service or product?
Changing an important policy or making updates that affect your customers?
Did you win an award you’d like to announce?

Your blog is the perfect place to let everyone know about these announcements, updates, and changes.

True, you have your website, hopefully an email list, and probably even a few social media accounts. But your blog is its own entity and can serve as the foundation that can then be magnified through all these other channels.

Magnify Your Blog

In general, a blog is long-form content. Even though there are times and places to be brief, your blog is the perfect place to experiment with longer, expanded messaging.

Let’s say you’d like to go into a deep dive on a particular topic and write, say, a 1500-word blog post. And then you write a sales email piece on this same topic. Your 1500-word blog post can be the perfect complement to your sales email, and you can even include the link to your blog post right within the email.

There’s another important point to writing a blog post to communicate with your customers.

When you blog and post on a consistent schedule, your audience comes to expect those from you regularly. It’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with them. They’ll not only appreciate the messages and information your posts communicate, but your audience will come to expect them. And this can provide a great boost to your sales.

Related: How to Write a Blog Post

Reason #3: Blogging Provides a Competitive Advantage

Do you know how many blog posts are posted on the internet per day? About 4 million! That’s a lot, right?

So how can you even begin to compete in a space that has all that going on? How do you stand out in such a crowded place?

It may seem as though there’s no room for yet another voice, BUT… individuals, organizations, brands, and businesses use their blogs to be more competitive all the time.

Competitive Advantage #1

Let’s say, for example, that your field of work is in adult education. You operate in a specific market, a niche, and compete with several other businesses in your field. If those businesses don’t have a blog to begin with, you’re already ahead of your competition.

But maybe they do have a blog, and maybe their posts are sloppily constructed and/or contain a lot of typos or their brand voice is inconsistent… or maybe their blog hasn’t been updated recently. (This happens a lot, by the way.) You simply build a better blog.

Competitive Advantage #2

Let’s say you find a blog post on your competitor’s site that you’d like to publish on your own site. All you have to do is write a better one. Be more detailed or provide a different point of view on the topic. Brainstorm tips and strategies to include in your post. By going deep or taking a different approach on the same subject matter, you can gain a competitive advantage.

And when you launch a blog with extremely specific and powerful content, now you’re on your way to becoming a thought leader in your industry, the go-to person, the expert.

Include Research

Specifically including data in your post will allow you as a brand to take a basic topic to the next level. A simple statistic can be repurposed into a compelling blog post and make your content all the more interesting. Just make sure you’re using important, timely research when crafting your story.

Reason #4: Blogging Establishes Your Brand & Brand Voice

Since blogging helps you become much more competitive within your industry, it’s important to spend plenty of time developing your content strategy. Your blog is the foundation of this strategy. Your goal is to stand out in the minds of your readers as an expert in the field.

One of the ways to stand out is by developing a brand voice.

If you already have an established blog, that means you probably already have a website. You also probably devoted a lot of time and money developing it to make it user-friendly and visually appealing. That also means you probably already have on-brand, well-written web copy and took the time to develop your brand voice.

When blogging, your brand voice becomes solidified.

What is Brand Voice?

Brand voice essentially is your brand’s personality. Usually, it involves communicating a specific set of values and attitudes using specific language that lines up with what your business wants to achieve.

By the time you launch your blog, your brand voice should already be well-established.

Know what tone you want to write in and
which subjects/topics you will write about.

And if you have a general sense of your brand voice, but aren’t quite sure how to define it, here are some pro tips from the Content Marketing Institute that may help:

Pro Tip One: Pull a nice sampling of content & read through it.

Review your website copy as well as other marketing materials you use to get a sense of your
- language style,
- word choices,
- length of sentences and paragraphs,
- formality,
- and any other factors that stand out to you.
Make notes of what appears to be consistent throughout.

Pro Tip Two: Describe your brand’s voice in three words.

What stands out to you from your notes
Are you quirky? Humorous? Dry? Blunt? Sarcastic? Fact-driven? Cheery? Etc.
Once you pick these three words, then refine their definitions a little more to describe what you see.
Ask for a second set of eyes (and more) from others to help you with this process.

Pro Tip Three: Create your brand voice chart.

You’ll want to map out:

Your major themes
And then the dos and don’ts of word choices, styles, etc.

The purpose of your chart is to keep everyone on your team on the same page when creating content and blog posts, so it remains consistent and true to your brand, no matter who’s putting it together.

Pro Tip Four: When rebranding or making changes to your business, you’ll want to revisit your brand voice chart & update it accordingly.

As time goes on, it’s perfectly natural for your business to evolve. Pay attention to your brand voice chart and make any necessary adjustments to that, too.

Remember: Your brand voice will determine the topics, strategy, and style of each and every blog post you create. And on the flip side, blogging will help you get a better sense of your brand voice. They go hand in hand with one another. And the more you blog, the stronger your brand voice will become.

When rebranding or making changes to your business, you’ll want to revisit your brand voice chart & update it accordingly. Click To Tweet

Reason #5: Blogging is the Launchpad for Your Complete Content Marketing Strategy

The benefit of your blog here is pretty straightforward. You’re basically repurposing your blog post content into other content formats. This allows you to more easily stay on top of your content marketing strategy without diminishing the quality of your material or your brand.

Remember that your blog posts are very detailed and compelling, and written to read like a story. When your story is clear, concise, and compelling, you’re on the right track to blogging success. This allows you to expand on that even further and convert your content into:

Video content
Social media posts
Free PDFs
Email marketing campaigns
Podcasts
Whatever else you can create.

Reason #6: Blogging Improves Your Brand’s Website Traffic

When you create and post high-quality content on a frequent and regular basis, you’re able to bring an unlimited number of readers to your website.

The goal of your content should be to keep your readers on your site for as long as possible. By holding your readers’ attention for more than just a few seconds, you increase the potential for making sales. After all, that’s what you’re in business for in the first place, right?

Here are a few awesome stats I discovered from Fast Company:

The average visitor reads only 6 words of a headline, and
15 seconds is the average time a visitor spends reading a blog post

Wow! Talk about short attention spans! You better make your efforts count! Here’s more:

If a visitor stays on your post longer than 15 seconds, on average 7 minutes, they’re reading about 1600 words.

Not too shabby, right? And if they’re staying on your site for at least that length of time, they’re more likely to return to your site to read other posts and may even explore other parts of your website as well… consistently. That means when your goal is to build a decent blog, your website traffic will grow consistently over time.

Here are some useful tools to help you make the most of this opportunity:

BuzzSumo – Shows popular topics that have the most social shares
Google Trends – a resource that graphs out how reader interest increases or decreases on a particular topic over time
SEMRush – provides invaluable intel on keywords your competitors are ranking for in Google Search results. This helps you improve your ranking on the search engines. SEO (search engine optimization) is a topic for another post.

These three tools are handy to help you boost your website traffic over time. More traffic means more leads, an email list that continuously grows, and ultimately more sales for your business’ bottom line.

Also… You can use these tools to gain intel on your target audience.

What are they searching for?
What do they want to know?
What problem do they need to solve?

This means you’ll know a lot more about them and build those relationships.

The Bottom Line…

Blogging helps you achieve important goals that are vital to the success of your business and is the foundation for your overall content strategy.

Remember that high-quality content will allow you to:

Tell your story
Communicate with your audience
Give you a competitive advantage
Establish your brand voice
Provide a launchpad for other types of content marketing
Boost your website traffic

Your blog is a great way to build relationships with your audience as the expert in your field, increase your exposure, and grow your business. These are the exact reasons why your brand needs a blog, so make sure you’re giving it the attention it deserves.

Until next time…

Happy blogging!

6 Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a Blog

Published by Dianne Robbins on