Blogging, the Core of In-Bound Marketing
For more than 15 years, blogs have been a tactic in search of a strategy — That isn’t the case any more.
The corporate blog is making a comeback within social media circles. If planned and deployed correctly a corporate blog can be an enticing customer forum. With its low barrier to entrance, its strong branding capability, and its ease of visitor access, a corporate blog can be a great source of reliable information for customers (and non-customers) about a company’s culture and outlook at an early stage in the relationship. Blogs are now being called on to act as central repositories for info about a companies activities, opinions, directions, and beliefs. They’re not limited to 140 characters, there is no login, and no “friending” or exchange of contact information required to access them.
“With such a centralized and open format, blogs should be a hub for your social media content to help consumers connect the dots of the Splinternet and engage with brands in meaningful ways.”
Forrester Research – The New Blogging Strategy For Consumer Brands.
However, corporate blogs have low credibility ratings. Only 12% of US online adults trust company blogs. This low trust rating is due to a history of poor planning and execution on the part of the companies that used them early on. In the past, companies would dilute their content with press releases that pushed “canned” or pre-packaged stories. They did themselves a further disservice by also using them as SEO pump and dump space and then seldom, if ever, updated them or added external links to both positive and negative reviews and comments. In short they weren’t transparent or honest in their dealings with their audiences. They were also slow to incorporate them into the newer social media stable and to create clear and logical connections to them from other company owned sites. All of this resulted in a disjointed and disconsonant blog presence and thus harsh treatment, mistrust, and lack of favor for them by the public.
Those were the errors of the past, but now a new use for blogs has emerged, one that requires them to be integrated with all of a company’s social media. This approach will help to reign in fragmented content for consumers and coordinate that content across all social media outlets, while at the same time making sure that it’s available to be easily accessed and consumed by viewers casually looking for info using multiple devices. Currently few companies offer customers an unfettered, un-encumbered, and centralized place to engage with its brand.
“Business blogs offer innumerable benefits over Facebook and Twitter. Sure, you want your business fishing where the fish are… …But to actively choose to place all of your company’s social capital into someone else’s basket fails to recognize the branded opportunity associated with a well-conceived and managed corporate blog.”
Entrepreneur – How the Fortune 500 Uses Social Media
There are some concrete benefits to having a blog and using it to keep your marketing material updated and current. This can be easily accomplished by using any of the major blogging software packages, they’re fairly easy to learn and use and they offer one big advantage: they are content management systems (CMS). This will give you tremendous flexibility since you can create the content, insert and delete copy, add videos, images and podcasts that promote your company and your products and services. Most of them come with pre-made templates that will allow you to build your entire site in them and thereby make them seamless between the two areas and easier to manage. This makes your site dynamic and constantly changing, and no one person will have to be critical path to the updating or editing and no one has to know coding to maintain the site.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo reward dynamic sites – that is to say they want to see fresh content delivered on a consistent schedule. Your reward is that those same search engines will send more people to your site. A static website just don’t do it anymore.
Here are 4 benefits to using your blog to drive social media:
- A 140-character tweet has its place. But your customers want to know there is a full-service company behind the tweet. A blog can contain all the information you had on your old website, but you can easily make changes and update the information to respond to changing market needs.
- You can invite guests, clients, thought leaders, industry gurus – to write guest articles. People like to show off their expertise.
- Readers can leave comments on your blog posts giving you valuable market insight.
- Readers can subscribe to your blog via RSS or Email
Blogging is a critical component of any successful content strategy. With a blog, your business can attract new prospects and reach existing consumers with educational and entertaining content that will improve brand value and awareness. Blogs enable brands and consumers to interact and foster trust, which is important to generating sales. Mainly it gives your business the opportunity to have in-depth discussions and explain complicated issues and by linking your social media you can alert your customers to any last minute changes and link them back to your business site in a way that allows for a complete and rewarding interaction
If you haven’t yet you should make your blog the centerpiece of your social media and content strategy.
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