When your customer base isn’t directly made up of the consumers that use your products, it can be easy to brush aside a marketing activity like blogging.
You can tell yourself you’re too busy keeping your retailers happy, developing new products, raising brand awareness, improving product delivery and outcomes and you can’t possibly have time for yet another “side project”.
But blogging is one of the simplest, yet still most effective online marketing tools that you can develop. And it has significant advantages, even when you don’t sell direct.
But don’t be fooled.
We’re not necessarily talking the traditional essay-style written form of blogging. Your blog can provide an offering of various forms of content that appeals to a wide range of learning styles.
You can feature videos, audio transcripts, images or Q&As. You can have long articles, or short anecdotes, customer reviews or infographics. The options are endless and there is so much you can do to build your brand through a blog.
In a nutshell:
- Blogging helps you develop your brand’s online ‘voice’
- It further develops your presence on the web and your expertise as a leader in your industry
- It educates and entertains your customers which in turn can help to drive sales
Let’s break each of these advantages down.
Develop Your Online “Voice”
If you blog consistently, over time you’ll find yourself developing your own particular style. This will help customers get to know your business and brand and encourage growth of the crucial “know, like, trust” factor.
In addition, a blog prevents your website from stagnating, ever providing fresh content for search engines to play with. It helps you stand out from the competition and ensures that the voice you are conveying is one of constant evolution and improvement.
Establish Yourself in Your Niche
Blogging affords you a unique opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. It gives you the perfect opportunity to put your knowledge into words, actions, images or audio and to share that in a space that you own.
While social media might be fun, it’s also relatively transient, and none of us own it. What was news yesterday, is now a long way down the feed and well outside our control. Any major news and updates should be crafted into a blog post which will have it’s own special place on your website and which can be pulled out from the archives again and again as you establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
Your blog can become a veritable treasure trove of industry goodness.
Your blog will also give you a platform from which you can approach other businesses and brands.
Educate and Entertain (Them and You!)
If you’re going to keep at this blogging gig, it’s got to be enjoyable. Like all good marketing activities, blogging should feel authentic and purposeful. It should seek to truly help those who need or sell your products and should provide one more channel for sharing your message within an intentional business.
If you want to enjoy your blog, create it the way you want it to be, not the way you think it should be. Blogging for business is a commitment. It isn’t something you should do just because you feel you have to, or because everyone else says you should, or because everyone else is doing it.
It should provide education and entertainment both for your readers and for you. Otherwise it’s a chore. And marketing chores always end up pushed to the backburner, until finally they’re forgotten.
Keen to get your own blog happening? The Wholesale Blogger’s Blueprint is for you -everything you need to know to start and continue a successful blog as a wholesaler. Sign up today to find out when the course launches in April!
