Sat Sep 4

The Benefits of Blogging to Promote Your Business

If you have a company blog, then you are actively carrying out a branding exercise. In order to benefit from this you need to generate engaging, interesting, thought provoking and relevant content that appeals to your business or target audience. Your intention is to attract an interest from customers that they would not have had without you sharing this blog with them. This is not sales driven branding, this is content driven branding. What you are trying to achieve is a community of people who find your content to be captivating. If it relates to them and their experiences then they can understand and reflect on your content in a way that is much more rewarding than copywriting.

Anything you post on the internet can be searched for, found, read and reviewed. Anything you post on website or blogs to post, the content should be relevant to the Website. For example, Digital Junkies, an online marketing agency writes content according to their website and the services they offer. This is bad if you are writing poor content as it means you are misrepresenting your brand the way you are perceived. However getting it right means you can reap the benefits of Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are content driven, they like good content and they like popular content. Benefiting from Search Engine Optimization allows you to gain from your best kind of potential customer - someone who is actively searching for your services rather than pushing them on to them like offline marketing. You also gain from (and this is more valuable) a well perceived brand. Techcask.com talks more about the importance of good content.

Now you are firing on all cylinders. You have an optimized blog that has its own community of interested customers, and you have a website that is rising in the ranks of search engines on a daily basis. This means more potential customers can find you - more enquiries - more sales.

How is it relevant to my business then?

Quite simply you must make it relevant to your company. By that I mean create relevant content that's important to the reader, whether the reader is a supplier, employee or customer. Creating content that engages them with your business in a thought provoking manor allows them to see your business from a more personal perspective rather than spoon fed corporate copywriting and sales patter.

Now let me make this clear, blogging is neither necessary nor essential for every single business that's out there. In fact in our industry (Online Marketing) we often here about cases where clients are sold on a lot of features that are not relevant to their business and will not add value to their online presence. On the other side the digital Junkies, an SEO company gold coast has the best skilled workforce where they know which feature is used for increasing growth for the business.

Creating relevant content to your business can generate your own community - that you would not have had without a blog. This community can then sign up to your RSS feeds or email lists. This is golden and means you can start to build up a list of active subscribers who are interested in A) your business B) The content you are writing/ talking about.

How is the writing style different?

A blog is not and should not be used to force feed your customer’s sales jargon that they hear from you in Newsletters, Press Releases or Direct Mail. Instead it needs to be tactically written in a way that allows the reader to see a different side to you and the business - a personal touch. This way they can relate to you as a person as well as a business and can be encouraged to get involved with your writing. This can be in the form of writing a comment on the blog, or by discussing the content offline with peers and colleagues. This is an invaluable piece of marketing - Word Of Mouth.

Does it matter if my company is small or large?

Whether your a one man band or a multi-million organization you can still generate interesting content that is relevant to your target audience. The point is to make yourselves stand out from your competitors and attract customers to find you, stick with you and recommend you to others. If you can generate a community that is interested in hearing what you have to say....then you will have achieved that objective.