Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog
Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog
In a competitive environment where businesses are hard-pressed for advertising dollars but anxious to reach and impact a finicky consumer base, savvy businesses have turned to blogs.
Five reasons businesses find blogging beneficial are
1. Economics
Dollar for dollar, blogs are less expensive to create and maintain than traditional ad campaigns. They are convenient to utilize and can generally be launched and maintained at a fraction of the cost and effort of yesteryear’s advertising venues.
2. Infinite Branding
Blogs are “tagged” with key words and “linked” back to a business’s social media and website to build a digital footprint that builds upon itself. While many traditional ad campaigns can fizzle out over time, a properly maintained blog will build momentum and gain “advertising speed.”
3. Intimate Exposure
Blogs are an ongoing journal that share a company’s history, value system, announcements, progress, and new products and services. Companies use blogs as a forum to collect readers’ opinions, invite feedback, and educate people about their products or services. Blogs are a strong tool in relationship-building and allow consumers to do business with people they can get to “know,” like, and trust without traditional face-to-face pressures.
4. Consumer Trust and Confidence
What if you could build a sales force of people who represented your company just the way you wanted them to, 24/7? That is in essence what a blog can do for you. You construct your message and it reaches people intact without being diluted by other factors.
5. Outlast the Competition
In the past five years alone, there has been a strong, (startling!), and measurable shift in the way companies reach their customers. While blogging has become an advertising triumph for those in the know, those who cannot or choose not to enter the digital media ring to compete will soon find themselves knocked out.
Questions? Contact ShellyKent@comcast.net
Using Blogs in Business: Establishing your Edge
Blogging Takes Web by Storm, Businesses Scramble to Catch Up
Written By: Shelly Kent
Gone are the days of idle teens and all night web-dwellers posting petty comments alongside relevant articles. Today, blogging is a sensation that businesses turn to as a method of smart, relevant, and budget-friendly advertising in a careful attempt to navigate their growth and survival. Today’s savvy business owners use blogging as a method of communicating carefully planned and enticing information that is designed to educate and connect with their customers.
Professionals use blogs to establish credibility or relevance with their consumer base. A shop may communicate a new product, a restaurant–live band night, a bookstore–book signings. A blog should be an ongoing portal of communication that builds information for your readers. Doctors may blog to communicate their medical opinions on debated issues such as vaccine and autism, or the HPV vaccine for young girls. They can also use blogging to disseminate important information quickly, such as symptoms that should prompt a medical visit during the Swine Flu outbreak.
Effective blogging takes time, a keen sense of business, and an intuitive approach to what customers need to hear. Using an informal tone and educating customers about your industry without directly pushing your product will make your blog one your audience will both watch for and value.
The benefits of maintaining a business blog are
• Search engines will rank you higher based upon your readership and how recently your content was updated. Higher rankings mean more visitors, resulting in more clients and more dollars.
• You can communicate instantly and effectively with your client base, many of whom will come to rely upon your blogs as their information source.
• Clients can reach you about topics relevant to them. They can provide you with consumer feedback or initiate a conversation any time of day or night.
• You establish credibility and create a connection with your consumers. Blogs are a personal conversation with your customers and demonstrate that there are astute and thoughtful individuals in your business versus a large, inaccessible corporation.
• The casual nature of blogging allows your company to gain recognition for things that are typically left out of mainstream advertising. (I.e., charity work, employee profiles, product reviews, industry advice.)
• Blogging communicates the culture of your organization and builds both trust and authority with your readership.
Blogs should always contain
Relevant Information
Accurate Communication
Timely News
Frequent Updates
Proper Grammar and Spelling (limited abbreviations)
Text that is Casual and Friendly in Tone
For more information, or for help maintaining your company’s blogs, please contact me at shellykent@comcast.net.
Until next time, Farewell and Blog-Luck!
~Shelly Kent
www.shellykent.com
