Blogging is a common marketing tactic—that we often recommend to our clients—to drive website traffic, improve SEO, and positioning a brand as a trusted resource.
But blogging takes its own resources: time and money, so if you’re asking yourself why blogging may not make sense for your brand, you’re asking a good question that will get to the heart of whether your brand will get the ROI you’re looking for from your marketing resources.
While blogging is powerful, it might not be the best investment for every business. Read on to learn how blogging is designed to work, and when blogging might not be the best fit—with tips for alternate ways to reach your audience and meet your goals.
How blogging works
To understand why blogging may not be the best place to put your resources, it helps to know what makes blogging a powerful marketing tool in the first place.
Blogging serves a number of purposes:
- It produces content that you can repurpose in many ways, such as sharing on social media and in email campaigns
- It positions you as a thought leader or expert in your field
- When you blog with SEO in mind, it helps you rise up in search rankings
For many businesses, these are powerful benefits. But for some brands, these functions won’t help them reach their individual goals. If your business meets one of the following conditions, your marketing resources might be better spent on another tactic.
5 reasons why blogging may not make sense for your business
#1 If you’re already getting a ton of website traffic to your site and converting users really well.
Maybe your business is already getting a lot of traffic through social media, local search results, your Google business profile, and effective website copy that includes keywords and engaging content.
What to do instead: Keep your website and business profiles up to date (Google My Business, Yelp, travel site profiles, etc.), request and respond to reviews promptly, ask for testimonials, and maintain your website to avoid dings to your SEO.
#2 If you need overnight results.
Blogging is a smoldering, long-term game that fits into a larger content marketing and SEO strategy. It can pay off big time, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It can take months to achieve the results blogging brings.
What to do instead: Pay for advertising, such as Facebook ads or PPC marketing.
#3 Your business gets a ton of traffic from mega-monster referral sources.
Mega monsters are huge websites with a dominating presence on search engines that are impractical to compete with, such as OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angi (formerly Angie’s List), or Amazon. It’s not worth the energy or money to rank higher than these sites (especially if they’re helping you), so why bother?
What to do instead: Focus on asking happy customers for reviews to improve your ranking within these mega sites (and don’t forget to respond to online reviews).
[We’ve got you covered with advice for responding to both positive and negative reviews.]
#4 If people are not interested in reading about what you do.
Even if what your business does is super valuable and interesting, it doesn’t mean that the content is interesting to read about. What your business does might be so high over people’s heads, that all they care about is knowing that you can do it for them effectively.
What to do instead: Focus on building a success story section on your website or testimonial page that leverages your customers’ words to reinforce your value and expertise.
#5 If search engines are not a major way people find your business.
Where are the majority of your customers coming from? Are they local and know you through word of mouth, or tourists coming into your brick and mortar store? Are they coming through your social media feed on Instagram? Before investing in blogging, it’s important to know your typical customer persona, and how they’re finding your business so you can meet them where they are.
What to do instead: Dig into your analytics to be certain you do understand the top 2–3 ways customers find your business, and then nurture those sources.
[Don’t have analytics set up? Get started here.]
To blog, or not to blog
If none of these situations apply to you, and you’d like to know more about how blogging can help meet your marketing goals, you can read more about how blogging increases sales and guides customers through the discovery journey.
But if you see your business in this post, you can feel confident in taking a pass at blogging for now, and instead invest your time and money in other marketing tactics to reach your brand’s specific goals.
Ready to figure out the best marketing tactics for your business? Book a no-cost exploratory call to get started.
Key Takeaways
- Blogging can drive traffic to your website, improve how high your website ranks in search, and position your business as an expert resource.
- Blogging is not for every business, so it’s important to understand if it can help your business before investing the time and money.
- Alternatives to blogging—when blogging is not a good fit—include social media content, paid advertising, building your Google business profile, asking for customer reviews, email marketing, and improving your website’s copy.
Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash.
