October 10, 2022
Future Proof Your Ecommerce Brand: Why do you need a blog for Ecommerce?
Blogging is a staple of content marketing strategies for good reason. It works, and it works extremely well. Despite this, so many businesses are not taking advantage of this powerful marketing tool. If you have a brand, business or eCommerce site, this article is here to tell you exactly why blogging isn’t just important to grow and scale your business any more, it is essential.
Changing consumer behaviour over the last decade has meant that blogging has moved from a niche hobby into a crucial part of every business and brand. That change has not come easy to the majority of business owners who feel more comfortable with more traditional marketing efforts such as paid ads and want to concentrate on the more practical day to day aspects of running their businesses. That is entirely understandable. Content marketing as a whole and blogging in particular takes a lot of skill, time and resources, which is why much of it is often outsourced, and frankly most business owners just want to sell their products, but blogging is not something that can be ignored in today’s marketplace if you want your business to thrive.
A blog section has become so fundamental to any eCommerce or branded business website that you would now be hard pressed to find a successful business without one with 86% of B2C websites on average taking advantage of them. One piece of research, by Demand Metric identified that content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing Trends 2022, with the exception of the numerous social media platforms as a whole, blogging is the most consistent, cost effective and popular marketing efforts for brands to put resources into.
Now to be fair, doing something just because everyone else is doing it is usually not the best advice, but potentially being left behind in a competitive marketplace is certainly reason enough to take that advice on board. f your website, business or eCommerce site does not have a blog section you will hurt your chances of being seen a in search engine results, and your competitors – who will almost certainly have a blog – will be found by your potential customers instead. If consumers do find you they will see your site as simply a catalogue with no value beyond the basic transaction and will have no reason to stay on your sales funnel or trust you as a seller.
To put it simply, your business needs a blog. Still not convinced? Let us take a look at just a few more statistics.
Studies show that at least 77% of all internet users will regularly read blogs. In fact many blogs are so good and so quintessential to online topography now that many consumers won’t even realise they are reading a blog post at all. To many it will be just an informative, useful article they found at the top of Google search after asking a question. Most website traffic, 27% to be specific, comes through organic search, or to put it another way that is your potential customer finding your website through blog articles and posts at the top of search engine rankings. That means your site – and by extension your products or services – are more likely to be found randomly by someone simply searching for an answer to a question or looking for some entertainment than someone specifically looking for you. Small businesses with blogs increase their lead growth by 126% over those that don’t, with 69% of companies who ran a blog campaign attributing that to a specific spike in lead generation.
Can your business afford not to take advantage of this?
But as impressive as those statistics are, they don’t always give you the whole picture. Like content marketing in general, the benefits of blogging are primarily qualitative over quantitative. The human factor cannot be understated, and it is here that you have to look to see the true benefits to your eCommerce business or brand.
Online behaviour has changed drastically over the last decade or so. People don’t want to be constantly bombarded with paid ads, they are savvy enough to simply dismiss a hard sell and want a relationship with the brands they buy from. Consumers want to know who you are, what your brand stands for, why they should trust you enough to part with their hard earned cash and just as importantly, why you deserve it.
Your business needs to stand out from the crowd now. It needs to be much more than a simple online shop, it needs to provide a full online shopping experience. It needs to be an asset for your customers and somewhere they can turn to for information, advice and entertainment. If you still aren’t convinced just look at the most successful brands and businesses out there. They all have a blog. They all provide this relationship at every stage of the customer journey. If you want to be as successful as the biggest brands and eCommerce sites out there, then copy what the most successful ones do. Get a blog!
By writing blog posts and articles that answer a specific consumer question, solves a problem for your potential customers or is somehow useful to them in a wide variety of other ways, a blog will instantly turn your eCommerce site from a simple catalogue into a valuable resource. Some of the biggest and best brands in the world don’t just sell products to people, they give them information on why they need them, on how to use them or take care of them, they help them with any potential problems and show readers exactly how their products can help solve their issues. This builds a relationship with your customers before they even look at your products and garners a lot of trust, which is a priceless commodity for any business.
Blogs have the opportunity to build your brand, increase your industry authority and create an online presence that covers every single point of the whole customer journey. The content that is created on a blog can reach a wider range of diverse audiences far easier and far more cost effectively than any other medium, speaking to them in a niche specific and personal way, entertaining them and providing value at the same time. Even audiences that your product or service may not be traditionally marketed to can find you through articles that appeal to them on a personal level.
Having a good blog on your website is akin to having the footfall of a huge, centrally located shop in a busy city centre as opposed to footfall down some hidden side street in a sleepy town, and having someone show every single person who turns up exactly how and why your products and services will help them.
Blogging is quite simply one of the easiest, most cost effective and powerful marketing tools you have at your disposal, the question is now no longer whether you should have one or not, it is why haven’t you got one already?
Blogs do take time, skill, strategy and resources to manage, and if you don’t have your own in house team to do that for you, Cloud Seller Pro’s team of industry experts are here to help provide you with all the content you need.