Is your business a Food and Beverage manufacturer, retailer, wholesaler or trader? Is it a restaurant, fast food, bakery, butchery or even a grocer?
Launching and growing your business blog could be the business/sales growth breakthrough you have been looking for.
In this time and age, brands and businesses are increasing getting more sales and leads through a simple business blog. With just one click of a search button, a customer can be buying your products, and if you offer enough value, they will repeatedly buy from you.
Thanks to a business blog, your business’s information is easily accessible online.
Research has shown that a buyer searches and consumes information or content related to their need before making the final buy decision.
According to Hubspot, 47% of consumers search and consume approximately 3-5 pieces of content before buying the product. These content pieces could be an article about a product or service, a video explaining the use of the product, a description of the product or business location, as well as reviews and testimonials.
The 21st century buyer wants to build trust with the business selling products they need. Hence, one of the core reasons why it’s essential to design a content strategy focused on attracting and gaining trust of potential customers.
A business blog is the ideal marketing channel to serve this purpose and more so to give you lasting visibility online.
Let’s say you are in the baking business. What baking services do your customers need? Do your potential customers know about the services you offers, the different cakes you offer, the flavors, the designs, and the types of occasional cakes?
With a business blog, you can easily create a learning experience for your potential and repetitive customers. You will be surprised how calls will start trickling down and your sales will hit the roof.
Always remember, and especially in the Food & Beverage industry where the customer can assess the quality of your products almost instantly, offering value and the best quality should always be your guiding rule. Who doesn’t like a yummy and beautiful cake for their birthday party?
Don’t Have A Blog in your Food And Beverage business?
The Food and Beverage Industry is one of the most competitive sectors to conduct business in. This is attributed to the fact that we need food to survive and the existence of many options/businesses in the industry. Therefore, a business can decide to be ordinarily offer its products and services or stand out and provide extraordinary products and services.
How did KFC rise to become an international brand? Nestle is also a good example. They were not the first ones to break into their market and niche. No.
What they had is the unique differentiating factor bundled with an exceptional product value proposition to their customers.
However, that is one side of it, you may have an excellent product or service that may even beat brands like KFC and Nestle, but if your customers know nothing about them or even your existence, how can they buy from you? This is where your business blog comes in.
Reason #1: Driving traffic to your website
If your business does not own a website, you must be serving a limited number of customers of whom you all know and are loyal to you and your products.
A blog provides you with the opportunity for your website to be indexed on Google search engines. According to Hubspot, business websites with a blog are indexed 434% more than those without. Do you know what this means? Those are 434 opportunities right there to educate, inform and sell/pitch your products and services to your potential customers through traffic coming in.
With easy integration with other platforms such as social media, you can have traffic trickling in to and from your website through your social media platforms. I am sure by now you understand the power of mobile and social media.
Do you want more cake orders; link your social media platforms to your website. Then post a link of a blog post containing beautiful photos of the different types of cakes you offer on your social media. This will drive traffic to your website and it will be easy to convert the leads and close the sales.
This could be your business blogging about your blueberry mallow cupcakes. Who wouldn’t love one or three?
This is the power of SEO and inbound marketing: proven to have a closing rate of approximately 14.6% in comparison with 1.7% for outbound methods such as direct mail. As you may already know SEO capitalizes on keywords; make sure you are well versed with keyword search techniques.
Reason #2: It establishes your business as an authority in your industry
Let’s say you consistently blog about the different types of cakes, the different themes, showcasing different designs, flavors as well as happy customers; how is a person searching for a wedding or birthday cake likely to land on your website and even call you for advice if not buy from you? Most definitely, they will.
When a potential customer lands on your website and finds all information they need, and extra, on what they are looking for, they will automatically rank you as a pro in that sector. Who does not want to buy from the best? That’s when you close the sale.
However, it must be noted that to reach this caliber of a pro and command authority, you must first create educational content offering value and solutions to your potential customers consistently.
One or five blog posts about cakes will not establish you as a pro, no. That’s being dreamy and over ambitious. What you need are more than 30-50 high quality blog posts in your website for your potential customers to start giving your business the recognition it deserves.
It takes hard work and a set marketing budget to get there.
Reason #3: It offers long-term source of sales and leads
Here is one misconception most business owners have about blogging; they think once they have written and published one or two blog posts, they should get their leads from there and that’s it. Oh no.
A blog written today may convert two months later and maybe not one or two leads but in terms of hundreds.
Here is one example. In December 2013, SmartBug Media, a close partner to Hubspot published a blog post, which only got 115 views after one month. That’s a poor performance, especially for such a top tier agency. However, in the following 58 (note that number) months, the post had 4,767 visits and views which led to 230 leads. Yes! 230 leads from one blog post published more than two years ago.
So, here is the thing. With your business blog, you can reap the results now, tomorrow, next month, year, or even the next five years; it is a long-term investment in your business.
Conclusion
The quality of your products and services determines the continued success of your business: you can have one time customer or forever-loyal customers.
Make your blog your main communication and marketing tool to your customers, and make sure to integrate it with your social media platforms.
Finally, be willing to pay the price and invest your time and money on growing your business through your business blog.
#Pro tip:
If you are in doubt you can deliver the best, hire a content marketer to do it for you professionally. It will definitely pay off.
#KhabarLive #hydnews
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