4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Regular Blog

When someone mentions blogging, the first thing that comes to mind is probably moms with handy life hacks, recipes, and insightful tidbits on life. But have you ever thought that blogging could help your business? There are many reasons why a blog could step your marketing up to the next level, and we're here to help hash it out for you.

Here are 4 reasons why your business needs a regular blog:

• Blogging fuels search engine optimization (SEO): This is a biggie. Maintaining a consistently updated and relevant blog increases the likelihood of your posts being featured higher in search results. This is obviously a major key in growing your business, and it drives much wanted traffic to your website, resulting in potential leads, resulting in potential sales. Fresh content gives Google's search engine algorithms opportunity to index your website. Google rewards websites with recent, up-to-date information so frequents posts gain more attention.

• Blogging develops a relationship with your customers: A blog helps you connect with your customers on a deeper level. Your customers may relate to the story behind your brand, but there's always room to connect on a deeper level. By showing the culture, behind the scenes, and employee profiles your audience feels like they are part of more than just a business. Your regular, fresh content is an effective way to create a reliable source of information for your customers. They'll learn to count on your blog in order to solve their problems.

• Blogging will improve your social media presence: There is a lot of value in posting your blogs onto your social media. The more you share, the more your followers will take notice and join in, whether it be to discuss the blog content or to share it on their own profiles. It's a great way to provide value for your followers and help them fund solutions to the problems they're trying to solve.

• Prove your know-how: People want to know why they should buy your product/service. Take the time to explain why your product or service is the absolute best with a blog. Use how-tos, testimonials, and frequently asked questions to extinguish any concerns a potential customer could have. Go deep when writing about topics you know extremely well. It will help you gain greater credibility with your customers and your community.

Instagram's New Feature to Gather Audience Feedback

Instagram has been rolling out some pretty exciting updates, and they aren't showing any sign of slowing down! On May 10th, 2018 Instagram announced a new addition to Stories: The Emoji Slider.

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The Emoji Slider is a new audience feedback sticker riding in on the coattails of the popular Polls sticker. It's a similar idea to Polls, but instead of the basic "Yes or No" binary set of options, your followers have the freedom to really tell you how they think, which may be within "shades of gray," so to speak. It's extremely customizable, from the background color to the emoji on the slider, making it unique and tailor-made for your story!

You can use this update to ask mundane, commonplace questions, ("How much do you HATE traffic?") to gathering important feedback on an upcoming release ("Thoughts on this new pattern?"). Either way, it's a fun and useful addition to Stories!

How do you use it? It's super simple!

• Once in the Stories camera, open up your stickers tab in the top right corner of your screen, and find the slider sticker with the heart-eyes emoji.

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• Tap on it and you can start typing out your question!

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• Want a different emoji? No problem! Just tap the default heart-eyes emoji, and you can now search up and use any emoji you want!

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• Now you can post to your story and get some opinions! You can check all the feedback by clicking on the "views" icon on the bottom left of your screen while viewing your story! It'll show who voted and their individual answers!

PC: instagram-press.com

That's it! It's a super simple process, but it will be a huge help in getting that invaluable follower feedback! What do you think of the Emoji Slider? Let us know in the comments!

Why Storytelling is a Major Key to Your Brand's Success

The room is dark except for the soft, warm glow of your bedside lamp. You just slipped into your soft, warm bed and your mom hands you your favorite teddy bear. You snuggle in and prepare yourself for your favorite part of bedtime: the bedtime story. Your mom kisses you on the forehead, turns off your lamp, and moves to shut the door. Your face pinches into a frown. 

"Wait!" You call, "I won't go to sleep without a bedtime story!"

Entrepreneurs often forget the immense power of storytelling. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in statistics and data, especially since they can be the very basis of your brand. While these are obviously important factors, the average person may not understand, or care about the numbers. 

While listening to stories, the human brain releases a cocktail of organic chemicals, making stories a rewarding and pleasurable experience. The most important of these chemicals (at least from a marketing standpoint), is oxytocin, which is produced when we are trusted or someone is kind to us. It enhances empathy which is the ability to feel and experience others' emotions. This knowledge can be a major tool in growing your brand.

Two men, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, proved the successfulness of storytelling in business with their 2009 "literary and anthropological" experiment, Significant Objects. Here was the gist of the experiment:

"A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!"

This experiment saw the men purchasing $128.74 in thrift shop trinkets (averaging out to about $1.25 per item), then enlisting the help of 100 contributing writers to compose short stories for item descriptions. The items sold on eBay for a staggering $3,612.51 in total. Check out the results for yourself!

Michele Miller, a digital marketing specialist, said, "Narrative transforms insignificant objects into significant ones." What does this mean for you? Let's say you found your great-grandfather's old, handcrafted leather journal tucked away in the attic of your childhood house. You spent hours devouring stories of love, war, and family, carefully flipping through the slightly yellowed pages of history. This inspired you to create your own line of handcrafted leather journals. Once you put your story out there, it instantly sets your journal apart from every other journal out there. It's more than just a notebook to write absentminded notes on — it's an effort to keep history alive. This journal is suddenly significant to a customer because they relate to your story and your mission.

Of course, not all stories are quite as romantic as the above anecdote. But don't think your brand can't be just as engaging if your story isn't frilly. You can still connect with your audience by sharing a specific experience that has motivated you, business related or not. You could even share your personal process and some of the ups and downs that inevitably come with creating and keeping a brand. The key is to simply show you're human and don't just care about the sales. This can help to create life-long followers.

Incorporate your "why" and your "how" into your business strategy. Make sure you're not leading with numbers and data, but with stories that engage and entice your audience. Just like you wouldn't go to sleep without a bedtime story when you were a kid, people won't invest in your brand without your story. Own it. Love it. Put it to use.

What's YOUR story? Tell us in the comments below!