While almost every brick-and-mortar business runs a website today, not all of them have a blog. Considering that a blog can benefit a site and the brand it represents in a lot of ways, not having one is a missed opportunity.

If you are one of those business owners who don’t find blogging advantageous yet, this article will hopefully change your mind. Here, we will uncover the six most significant reasons why a business — regardless of its size — needs a blog.

Delivers product knowledge

People are more likely to buy your product or service if they think it can improve their quality of life. While you can include product descriptions on your business site, the limited space leaves you with only a little room for highlighting their selling points. After all, you don’t want to overstuff the site with unattractive walls of texts.

With a blog, you get much more space to provide insight into each product you sell and how it can benefit customers. You can even dedicate those blog posts to answering customers’ most frequently asked questions — which is a great way to influence their buying decision.

Additionally, having a blog gives you the chance to showcase your less popular products or services. By dedicating individual posts containing relevant keywords to review them, you give those products an equal shot at being indexed by search engines. Thus, they will likely appear in SERPs whenever someone searches for related topics or keywords.

Sets the brand tone of voice

What sets good promotion material from the bad ones is the tone of voice. Content marketing won’t do you any good unless you know how to deliver it well to the right audience.

Blogging can help you solve this problem. It allows you to emphasize the brand’s tone of voice, thus giving the company a personality, thus allowing the brand to communicate with customers on a personal level and build trust.

More importantly, you get to segment your target market by shaping the writing style to match their preferences. Accordingly, you get to decide how you want the audience to perceive your brand.

For example, a food blog can use a casual yet informative tone of voice to better engage its audience. Meanwhile, a tech blog is likely to sound professional and aspirational as it aims to build authority and trust with tech-savvy readers.

For consistency purposes, your blog’s tone of voice must align with the company’s brand. Choosing the right blog name is the first step to ensuring it.

If you need inspiration, feel free to experiment with blog name generators listed on http://hostinger.com/tutorials/blog-name-generators/. Make sure to pick a name that’s unique, memorable, and resonates with your brand.

Boosts website SEO

If you own a website, you must know the importance of SEO. As one of the online marketing elements, SEO may affect your business’ conversion rates and overall sales. The better your SEO is, the higher your site will rank in SERPs — which leads to more traffic and exposure for your company.

Producing high-quality blog posts helps your site appeal to search engines’ algorithms. It, for one, allows you to incorporate long-tail keywords to increase the site’s organic traffic. Furthermore, users who perform research using long-tail keywords tend to have purchase intent already. Thus, it’s easier to influence their buying decision with your blog posts.

Blogging also keeps your website fresh and up-to-date. Search engines and visitors favor sites that continuously update their content. By blogging regularly, you get a better chance at climbing the SERP ranking and improve visitor retention — thus giving you a competitive advantage.

Gives insight into your target audience

To develop a personalized marketing strategy, you need to know your target audiences well. Only then can you appeal to their liking and influence their buying decision.

Through blog analytics, you get to analyze customers’ browsing behavior and personal preferences. Services like Google Analytics can provide insight into visitor demographics, most popular blog posts, and users’ behavior when accessing the blog among other analyses.

By knowing this information, it’s easier to craft targeted content and convert new visitors into returning ones.

Establishes a community

Unlike the static website, the dynamic blog lets you establish two-way communication between your company and customers. By enabling the comments feature, you provide space for visitors to have a discussion with fellow users and nurture a solid community.

As you establish authority in the niche industry, users with similar interests are likely to find your posts worth consuming. Once you reach this point, they will be the ones promoting the website via word-of-mouth marketing — giving you yet another hassle-free way to increase web traffic.

Having a community also means that you succeed in building trust with your audience. That sense of faith will make them prefer your brand over the competitors, thus improving your conversion rates in the long run.

Helps you stay ahead of the competition

Maintaining a blog takes a lot of hard work and dedication, but it can get you ahead of your competitors.

As it requires constant updating, there’s the need to follow the latest news, trends, and innovations within the industry. This practice is particularly important if you want people to recognize your blog as a credible source of information.

As a result, you get to not only appeal to search engines by producing fresh content but also learn something new about your business.

Blogging also keeps you on your toes. Having the constant need to observe the industry’s growth gives you early insight into potential market demands that your business can fulfill. Furthermore, it improves your technical and communication expertise in your business’ niche industry.

By establishing your authority and tone of voice, a blog distinguishes your brand from the competitors as well. Everyone may easily re-create stale marketing jargon, but only you can produce the type of content that your audiences love.

Not only does a blog promote your products or services, but it also helps potential customers solve their problems and improve their knowledge with informative content. If you ask us, that’s a way more effective way to market your business than yelling at their face just for the sake of promoting.