As the age of social media continues to evolve, many businesses are no doubt contemplating if blogging is still an important piece of the puzzle in their marketing and advertising efforts.
While businesses blog for different reasons, the overriding goal behind blogging is to target your customers. That being said, is your business still in the blogging mode?
What is Your Company’s Blogging Strategy?
For newer small businesses or those that are a step or two behind the eight ball with their marketing efforts, blogging gives them a chance to reach out to current and potential customers, while also giving their sites the opportunity to increase their page ranks via Google, Bing and other search engines.
Unfortunately, many companies fail the golden rule of blogging – keeping the site updated with fresh content.
Fresh content is not only a key factor in keeping the search engines interested in your copy, but also in maintaining and adding viewership. Whether you have a team or one individual dedicated to your company’s blogging efforts, be sure a solid plan is in place so that the blog is not neglected.
Secondly, your company needs to analyze the metrics of your blog, including what topics are of most interest and when and where the traffic is coming from. These two categories are but a few, however they are important in order to craft your blog to increase viewership to the site.
Thirdly, as more and more businesses deal with shrinking advertising budgets, blogs provide a great way to promote the company at a really cheap price – Free!
By offering interesting and regular content, your blog can provide your company with countless advertising opportunities to promote your brand; what company owner wouldn’t like that?
Added Benefits to the Company Blog
While fresh content, analyzing your traffic and the relatively inexpensive price of blogging provides companies with great incentives to blog, there are other benefits that come with blogs.
Blogs give companies the ability to both have conversations with countless individuals and also time for some one-on-one interaction.
If your company blog is getting feedback from viewers, are you taking the time to respond to them? If not, you should.
Back in the “old” times companies typically dealt with customers and their compliments, concerns and questions either in person, over the phone or via regular mail. With the modern technology world, the ability to have what seems like instantaneous contact between company and customer is very real.
Whether your company’s blog receives criticism, compliments or questions, it is important to take the time and respond to each and every comment. It may seem tedious to some, but customers will have more respect for your business if they know they have your ear.
As more and more companies turn to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages to communicate with customers, blogging should not be forgotten, even when the company heads view blogging with skepticism.
It should not come as a surprise that many small business owners view blogs with some hesitancy, wanting to see an exact return on investment (ROI) with such marketing vehicles.
If your marketing department is fighting an uphill battle with ownership over the worthiness of blogging, simply point out that blogs do much more good than harm for the company.
While company heads may feel that blogs are time-consuming, challenging for improvement when resources are limited, or could potentially lead to bad PR with complaining clients – simply shoot those down with the many positives.
Engagement with your audience can certainly lead to better business relations and better yet, potentially more business through word-of-mouth, end of story.
By engaging your audience and keeping your company name out there, you stand much more to gain than to lose.
