Business Blogs And The Benefits
Blogs, love them or hate them they are here to stay. Personal, political, product, biased, unbiased, critical……and business blogs, whatever the subject matter blogs are an important part of the web. They have the benefit of being extremely searchable and a powerful part of that are the tags, categories and RSS feeds, all of these make it easy for the customer to find what they are looking for (as long as everything has been tagged and categorised properly). Another important point to remember is to post regularly and make it relevant, there are about 112 million blogs out there (I know you’re thinking how can mine stand out in all those), but only about 11.2 million are actively being posted to on a regular basis, and when you start to categorise those blogs even further to those areas of business that are relevant to you and times by the amount of web users hungry for information, your business blog stands a good chance of grabbing a sizable audience.
You just need to figure out the objectives of your business blog first, is it to:
- increase sales
- act as PR for your business (media relations, reputation building or to get quick information out in a crisis)
- be a point of product information (not contained on your main site ie user reviews or technical data)
- drive traffic to your main web site (and increase its ranking with search engines)
- add a tone of voice and personality to an other wise faceless corporation/business
- as a general awareness exercise about your products and services
- establish yourself or your company as an expert in your business area
Blogs have the potential to reach a much larger audience than conventional marketing means. Because an individual post could be linked to from other blogs, can inspire comments and create a dialogue with customers and there is nothing quite like the buzz of word-of-mouth. Also you and your customers will gain a better understanding of each other and this will allow you to more effectively and efficiently market to them in the future. Your marketing mix can be greatly enhanced by generating candid feedback in the casual and totally open setting of a blog.
Increasing Traffic to your Business Blog
Make sure you have a link from your main company web site to your blog also if you or your friends or employees have a Facebook page a Twitter account or their own blog, see if they will give the company blog a link. Look at your site traffic and when it is busiest and try to post new content at these busy times. Try to encourage subscribers to your RSS feed so customers get new information and news as its published. Add your blog URL to your company business cards, literature and email sign-offs. Also try to encourage frank feedback, ending a post/article with a question is a good way to inspire comments and dialogue. Remember if you do get negative feedback do something about it as quickly as possible and follow up to ensure a positive resolution.
Getting Started With Blogging
The nice thing about blogging is you don’t have to have any knowledge of HTML or programming knowledge, all the blogging software around will do it for you. At Breathe we prefer to use Wordpress as we have found it to be easy to use and it has plenty of plugins and widgets to add extra functionality to a blog, it’s also very customisable style wise. To start you could just use an off the shelf template (Wordpress have loads to choose from). But there’s nothing like carrying over your brand image to your blog. We’ve done that at Breathe Marketing and plenty of big corporates do it too it helps to give a consistent tone of voice to all your marketing and borrows your brand values to add credibility to your blog from the start, it needn’t be that expensive either. A customised template can also be tailored specifically to your own marketing needs and can better achieve your marketing aims.
Other things you may wish to consider:
- who will blog? (sounds silly I know but someone has to be responsible for it)
- who will tackle negative feedback?
- and who will moderate the comments?
I hope this has helped you to gain a better insight into the benefits of a business blog and the powerful impact it can have on your marketing strategy and business in general. Who out there wouldn’t have a need for one? And who can spot benefits to their business that I haven’t covered?
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