by Mitchell 1

So you’ve set up your auto repair shop’s website, created your social media profiles, and now you’re wondering what it is you’ll be posting to your followers. The simple answer is to start a company blog.

Blogging gives you the ability to connect with your customers and provide them with solutions to the problems they have. In fact, a recent Technorati study found that most people turn to blogs when in need of trustworthy information. By creating your own blogs, you become that source of trustworthy information for anyone looking for auto repair.

According to the survey, blogs are the fifth most trusted source of information on the internet. This level of attention allows your repair shop the opportunity to position itself as a true leader in the industry by taking the time to publish a few blogs.

Why Start a Company Blog?

The main reason many organizations have made the decision to support a company blog is that it provides you an easy way to regularly produce new content. Why should you be trying to regularly produce content you ask? Content marketing is all the rage these days, and for good reason. By providing your customers with valuable content, you can better connect with your audience while generating new viewership from customers who may be in need of your services.

Connecting to Your Audience

To fully understand how to create blog content that is relevant and valuable to your audience, you first need to begin thinking like your audience. Imagine you’re in need of an auto repair service. Maybe your windshield cracked due to ice damage, or you’ve found yourself with a truck that won’t start anymore. What kind of information do you need?

In content marketing circles, this process is called creating customer personas. These personas allow you to empathize with your customer base and view the services you offer from their perspective. This connection becomes invaluable when it comes time to create your own blog content.

Blogging Generates Viewership

If you were to ask a content marketing expert what your company has to gain from a blog, they would likely tell you that blogging generates viewership. Many organizations have experienced this benefit first-hand after committing to a regular blogging schedule. This is best reflected in a 2015 Hubspot study that found that companies that published more than 16 blogs per month generated over three times as much web traffic as those that didn’t blog at all or blogged very little.

It’s for this reason that blogging has remained the backbone of many proven content marketing strategies over the course of the last few years. Blogging not only allows you to show off your industry knowledge, it helps make sure your content gets out in front of people who are trying to find it.

Generating Content

Once you’ve created profiles for you customer personas, you can begin the process of working to understand what kind of content would be most valuable to them. Using the example of the truck that won’t start from above, what kind of questions would your customer have? They would likely want to know what the potential reasons are that the truck wouldn’t be starting and if there was a simple fix they could use to start it up again.

The answers to these questions are the topics you need to be blogging about. When it comes to content marketing, everything comes down to trust. You need to become the authority that people turn to when they have a question about auto repair. The best way to do that is through blogging.

With your company blog, you have a platform that you can update regularly and fill with all the information your potential customers may need. By being there for your customers every time they have a question about auto repair, guess who they’re going to think of when they find themselves in a situation where they need to go to an auto repair shop?

Quality Over Quantity

While publishing a lot of blogs is a proven method of generating traffic to your auto repair website, publishing low quality blogs will actually hurt your rankings. A couple of million new blogs are published to the internet every day. With that much competition, you need to remember to put in the work to make yours stand out.

Blogging in 2017 is far different from just a few years ago, with search engines now better than ever at recognizing what content best represents what the reader is looking for. With this in mind, quality should always be your goal when writing your auto repair blogs. Take the extra time to make sure that your blog includes eye-catching pictures and follows the basic standards of good blogging to ensure you’re publishing content that will shine brighter than the competition.

Blogging and Engaging

What’s great about blogging is that it isn’t a one-way street. Sure you publish the blog, but that doesn’t mean you forget about it. Enabling comments opens your blog up to people who may still have questions about what they read, giving you yet another chance to show off just how much you know about auto repair.

Taking the time to answer your customers’ questions before they even step foot in your shop is a great way to build that all-important level of trust.

Distribution is Queen

There is a popular phrase in content marketing that “Content is king.” A few years back though, this idea was altered ever-so-slightly and now most industry experts agree that while content remains king, distribution is queen, and she wears the pants.

These may sound like silly quotes, but there’s a lot of truth to be found in this idea. Sure, you can create content and publish it to your blog, but that’s only the first step. Next, you must find ways to ensure that people actually read your content. Finding the right channels to distribute your content via social media, press releases, guest posting, or any other content distribution technique is key to building an audience. After all, you aren’t blogging just for the sake of talking about auto repair are you?

By finding effective methods of getting your content out there, you’re also increasing the odds that customers looking for answers will find those answers on your blog first. When you can become the one with all the answers as soon as customers ask the questions, you’re on your way to a successful company blog.

Knowing Who to Trust

If you need help better understanding how to reach your auto repair customer base or simply need a hand in marketing your shop, be sure to check out the SocialCRM shop marketing service.