As a marketer, you have probably noticed that blog pages are a common feature of many organizations’ websites. 

Nevertheless, you may be asking yourself or your team: Is a blog really worth it? Does the effort of creating medium-form to long-form content on a regular interval help your marketing strategy? 

While there are an infinite number of things that your marketing team could do if you had infinite time and resources, there are compelling reasons why blogging is one of the things your marketing team should do. 

Here are four reasons for your marketing team to invest in building a blog. 

1. Blogs Help Establish You as an Industry Authority

One of the greatest benefits of your blog is that it will help you establish your organization as an industry authority and thought leader. Blog articles are the perfect platform for you to share your organization’s philosophy, industry insights, and experience in your field. 

Readers will enjoy benefiting from the helpful information they find in your articles. But even more than that, they will begin to see you as an authority figure on matters related to the products and services you provide. Over time, that authority will translate into an inherent trust of those products and services, which will make selling them much easier. 

To create a blog space that expands your reputation as an industry authority, consider sourcing content from subject matter experts, many of which likely exist within your organization.

2. Blogs Help With Your SEO Strategy

Blogs can become an essential aspect of driving traffic to your website and helping you to appear in the top listings of search engine results.  

Use your blog posts to link to other posts and pages on your website, and work with your team’s SEO specialist to determine which industry related keywords your company should set its sights on and build content around. Remember that every time you add a new blog post, it gives search engines a reason to re-crawl your website, which may result in better indexing and better SEO overall. 

While not every blog post will immediately rank for the given keyword you were targeting, if you consistently use best practices, some of them will. In fact, a well-ranking blog post can continue to pay dividends for years to come, driving traffic and garnering engagement.

3. Blogs Help Build Your Email List

While it’s important to pour marketing energy into establishing your organization’s social media presence and following, there is still no more effective way to get your message out than through email. 

One common analogy is to say that marketing teams should build on land they own rather than land they rent. While social media platforms can change their algorithms or throttle your reach, you own your email list. So your team should leverage your blog to increase email subscriptions. 

Lead magnets are an important part of obtaining emails from potential customers. Nevertheless, your blog content will be vital in keeping subscribers engaged. Your email marketing goals should be far more ambitious than for the majority of your email subscribers to remain below the threshold of actively wanting to remove themselves from your list. Your goal should be that they would actually look forward to your email in their inbox. 

A well-executed blog may even elicit subscriptions itself apart from another lead magnet. When your content is excellent, it is a lead magnet unto itself. Capitalize on the hard work your team puts into your blog through prominently displayed subscribe options. You may even consider a pop up on your blog pages. 

4. Blogs Help You Build a Community Around Your Products

Vital to creating an organization that people are not merely willing to buy from but are raving fans of is creating a sense of community around your brand. Blogs help you to accomplish this by serving as the starting point for conversations, and they can showcase how effectively you are listening to your audience. 

Use your blogs to answer frequently asked questions about your products and services, your industry, or the latest trends emerging in your space. Invite feedback by asking people to comment on your blog articles, and share your blog content across email and social media. 

Further, blog posts can be repurposed to create smaller pieces of content that themselves drive further interaction and build community engagement online. 

Your team should also commit to being responsive when people comment and post questions. In fact, those comments and questions may be what inspires subsequent blog articles. Using your audience to help you generate ideas for content will help you keep your content from becoming stale or repetitive and will also speak directly to the types of questions people are seeking insights on.

Your Blog is a Long-Term Investment

The effort you put into launching and maintaining your company’s blog will not immediately seem like it is providing a return. But give it time. 

As you consistently put out high quality content on regular intervals, it’s like putting coins in the piggy bank. Eventually, it will pay off. Your content will begin to gain traction, and your audience will grow in both numbers and depth of engagement. 

Good content never goes to waste, and blogs are a vital type of content that your organization shouldn’t ignore.