Large companies have many different ways of growing sales.
Small and even medium sized companies on the other hand sometimes need to get more creative.
For small businesses with limited resources blogging might be a great option for increasing sales.
Business Blogging is About Sales
If you read a lot of other posts about business blogging you’ll probably read about engagement, authority and other topics. These are all great and are a result of business blogging, but we all know that at the end of the day a business needs to increase sales and increase profit.
That’s the point of building engagement or authority.
At GBW, we take the approach that business blogging is about increasing traffic, leads and sales. Not only is about increasing those things, it’s about increasing the right kind of traffic, leads and sales.
It’s one thing to increase traffic, but if you don’t have your ideal customer coming to your site you’re really doing nothing to grow your business. So much of blogging that matters is about focusing on the right kind of reader.
The Right Reader For Your Blog
With each new client we focus on three things:
1. The Company
2. The Industry
3. The Target Customer
All three are important. We need to get the voice right for the company. We need to make sure we understand the industry so the topics are on point and sensible. And it’s important to write about the topics the target customers cares most about.
One example I’ve seen across the Web is for a company that’s maybe in the travel industry blogging about online marketing. You might get some traffic because some people are searching for online marketing information and some of those people might be interested in travel, but you’re really not getting the right kind of reader.
Sometimes it’s more difficult to know who is visiting your site. We talked about the issue recently with the Sarah Lynn Design case study. The challenge on that blog is to make sure we’re writing posts that her ideal clients want to read and are searching for. It’s challenging because there are a ton of other designers searching for design related topics.
A topic might be “travel website inspiration”. Travel business owners are probably searching for that term, but so are other designers.
We also run into it here on GBW. I know there are some people that come to the site and the blog that are searching for a blog about ghosts (as in Casper The Friendly).
Finding Topics
You can’t control all the traffic to your site, but there are a few things you can do to make sure you’re getting the right people on your site. One way to do this is to find out what questions your ideal customer has as it relates to your services or product.
I’ve been using LinkedIn Groups recently to find those questions in small business groups. I take those questions and turn the answer into a blog post. It’s great because I already know that my target customer is asking about the subject.
Back To Sales
Yes. A business blog can increase sales for a small business. One of the major keys, though, is making sure you blog about the topics your ideal customer cares about.
From there measure traffic, leads and sales that come from your blog. You can track engagement or other metrics if you want, but you might as well track actual sales because that’s what you’re trying to increase.
Tracking can be as simple as putting a field on your contact form that says, “How did you find us?” or you could ask your clients when you first chat with them.
Blogging is about sales. To get those sales focus on the right reader. Then you’ll be setup for success.