How a Business Blog Can Connect You with Your Audience

These days every business not only needs a well optimized and responsive website, but also a blog to maximize the opportunities that provides a way to interact and engage with prospects and customers in a meaningful way.
See your content as a tool to connecting with your audience in a manner that not only fulfills their needs but also provides the essential human interface that builds trust and keeps those customers and prospects coming back for more.

People do not connect with businesses  – they connect with other people

That’s why personalizing your communication is the key to success in a constantly changing online marketplace.
A blog is your central hub where visitors can peep behind the business curtain and connect with the people who are involved with it on a day-to-day basis. Simply having a steady flow of valuable content will prove irresistible as people have become used to this as a chance to discover more and stay up to date.
In fact, 80 percent of readers are new according to an infographic shared by Right Mix Marketing:

Done correctly, your blog can act as a platform for news and announcements about your business, can answer the questions that most frequently arise and can even pre-empt complaints by dealing effectively with those that may have arisen in the past.
Hubspot reports several additional advantages to publishing content on our website:

• Increases traffic and indexes your pages each time you publish a post
• Improves visibility on your social networks
• Generates leads with the inclusion of a strong call-to-action
• Establishes your brand as a leading authority in your niche
• Continuously builds your SEO and online presence

A business blog can be one of the most powerful branding tools of all, delivering the image and essence of your business that you want to convey to the wider world. Here are just some of the big brands that use blogging as a powerful marketing tool:

Coca-Cola

This long-lived brand continues to draw in an interested audience through modern marketing methods as well as providing a history of the company:

Facebook

We all know this top network as a premier social media platform, but their blog also keeps us interested, informed, and up-to-date on the latest changes:

LuLu

Self-publishing has revolutionized eBooks and authorship, and this company provides the latest tips and information on how to be successful instead of just touting their own services:

Best Western

This major hotel chain not only provides travelers with multiple locations all over the world, but also great content that will help you better plan your next vacation:

It’s not only big brands and business owners who reap the rewards of running a blog.  There are any number of small business owners, online and off, who are also profiting from this essential form of marketing and you can do the same.
If, for example, yours is a family business and your brand is built upon that then you have the perfect means of introducing those people who not only made up that family in the past but who continue to deliver a great service today.
Your prospects and customers are always interested to learn the history behind the company, to discover how it was built and its ethos and to therefore feel even more connected to that business. Connection leads to trust, and that results in more sales.
If your business is purely web-based, then a blog gives you the chance to connect in a way that previously was only open to brick and mortar enterprises. With a blog you can reach out in a way that is the closest thing possible to face to face interaction by sharing your thoughts and reflecting your unique personality and brand image in your posts.
You will also be able to counteract the often justifiable mistrust with which prospects treat information online. An increasingly Internet-aware audience knows that the web is far too frequently used for pure commerce. They are bombarded with advertisements when carrying out searches, when surfing social media and even when checking their emails.
When a new visitor finds that your content is a valuable, personal resource then you are far more likely to attract a subscriber who will come back time and again to read your updates.
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