Effective marketing strategies are essential for small businesses, but advertising can put a big hole in your budget. You can feel like a hamster on a wheel, watching the cash flow in, and then out to cover your advertising.
Blogs offer an inexpensive marketing solution, especially if you take the time to integrate blogs into your business.
With a blog, you can interact with your customers and can boost your Web presence. A blog gets fast indexing in the search engines - a blog can be indexed in days, whereas Web sites and site pages may take months to show up in the search engine query results. More traffic to your site means more sales.
While a blog will benefit your business, you can get better results if you take advantage of the power of blogging, and integrate blogs into your business practices.
How To Integrate Blogs Into Your Business
There are many ways you can do this. Let’s look at three, to start you thinking about your business and the effects of blogging on it:
1. Look at your blog as a way to deliver customer service
You pay lip service to the notion of customer service, but “customer service” for small businesses usually just means responding to complaints. Your blog enables you to do more than respond: you can be proactive, giving your customers and prospects advice and free information on your products and your industry.
2. Look at your blog as a market research vehicle: an on-going focus group
Market research is expensive. Blogging is inexpensive.
Your business’s blog can act as your market research vehicle, functioning as an on-going focus group. Blogs work best when they’re a conversation, so encourage comments on your blog - offer prizes for comments, and respond to the people who comment.
As your blog gets readers, you can start using the blog for research. When your readers and customers see that you’re responsive, they will tell you what they like about your business, and about your competitors too. You can now use them as a sounding board - hey presto, very inexpensive market research.
3. Use your blog to stand out in your industry and humanize it
An honest, engaging, informative and entertaining blog is worth any number of formal press releases.
When Robert Scoble, a well-known blogging personality and the co-author of Naked Conversations, a book about blogging, started blogging as an Microsoft employee, Microsoft was looked on as a ruthless, faceless corporation, crushing all competition. Scoble’s enthusiasm for the benefits of technology helped to humanize Microsoft. Scoble wasn’t alone in his blogging, thousands of other Microsoft employees blogged too, but he stood out, and there’s no doubt that he helped to change the perception of Microsoft.
A blog can humanize your industry, and can help your business to stand out in your industry. We all tend to forget that businesses aren’t just entities, they’re people. Show your customers the people in your business, and your business will profit.
So there you have it - three ways you can integrate blogging into your business. Blogging is powerful, and the possibilities of what blogging can do for your business are unlimited.
Kevin | October 17th, 2007 at 12:45 pm #
I think one of the main benefits is traffic. Many business websites have less than 30 pages and do not have enough content to get a lot of traffic organically. Therefore, a blog which is updated often would increase the content on the site and would give more pages for the search engines to crawl
Michael Martine | October 18th, 2007 at 5:54 am #
Blogs, if regularly updated, also increase the frequency with which your site is crawled, increasing the likelihood that your site will appear in SERPs for the same keywords you’re naturally using in your blog post titles and content.