68% of marketers plan to increase their blogging in the near future! Well duh!

Those that have been blogging for a while are very familiar with how powerful a platform it can be. It allows you to create content for your consumers and serve it up to them regularly. It also forces the search engines to keep coming back to your site and index your new content. This is a good thing! Having more and more of your pages and or posts indexed is a good thing. Forcing the search engines to come back and see what you are doing over and over again is a good thing. But more importantly, putting great content out there that your consumers want is a great thing. A blog is a great way to do this, and you can do it on a piece of virtual real estate you own. Not on a Facebook page (which you don’t own) or a Twitter channel, YouTube channel, Instagram channel, or any of the other channels, none of which you own – unless Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sergey Brin or Larry page, you happen to be reading this, then this doesn’t apply as you do actually own them! What is worth noting though is that each of those aforementioned channels has a blog!

Want to know why they have a blog and why 68% of marketers are going to increase their blogging? Well here’s a small list;

• It’s way more cost effective than some of the outbound marketing activity they are undertaking – it’s an inbound marketing strategy that delivers and impressive ROI
• It allows you to start a conversation on your own real estate. Those conversations provide incredible insight and feedback from your target customers
• A blog over time builds trust – and people only buy from or refer to people or companies that they trust. Helpful content = Trust, Trust = Leads and Leads = Sales
• A blog can be your source for your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn channels
• A blog gives your company a voice – in fact it can give it many voices as your blog can be a platform that multiple employees can use – this not only gives your consumer an insight into the various different real people in your company, it also disseminates the content creation responsibility. Put some guidelines in place and suddenly all your employees are content creators!
• A blog is a great way to tell your brand story – you can really put the reasons why you are in business in the first place and help people to resonate with your; ethos, philosophy, morals and your employees.

And whilst writing this blog post I came across an infographic from Neil Patel at QuickSprout who has already done a great job on representing more reasons your business should be blogging. What this is, is content curation, which is a great part of your blogging strategy and there’ll be a post on that very soon. Check out the information from Neil and the guys at QuickSprout below.