Businesses are beginning to realize that a website isn’t enough to make a powerful online presence. Marketers have started to include blogging as a vital part of their online search engine optimisation and marketing mix. Surprisingly there are still many businesses out there that have no idea how blogs can help them.
They simply came up with a blog, not knowing how to make it work to their favor. Blogs are highly versatile tools that are capable of executing the different aspects of marketing—from the basic market researches down to creative guerrilla marketing, blogs offer businesses a lot of breakthrough opportunities.
Below are 5 of the most practical ways in which a blog can help your online business.
1. Writing blogs can create stronger links with your target market
Your brands gets a personality or at least its easier to get one when you publish a blog. Your blog allows people to directly interact with your brand, and they expect some sort of reply or acknowledgement that someone in your company has received and read their messages.
Maintaining this feedback loop allows you to keep an eye on your market and gives you a better conversion rate of prospects to loyal clients.
2. Blogs attract fresh insights and inform you of new category trends
Keeping communication lines open for your blog visitors, you will undoubtedly gain fresh insights and new suggestions. The beauty of this is that you don’t need to pay anyone to talk to the consumers for you, but you still get the information straight from the primary source.
Organize the information you have gathered and make them work to your advantage, only you can do that. Go one step further by cross checking your data. Visit your competitors blogs and see what their visitors have to say about them. Doing so would definitely give you a better view of your marketplace.
3. Blogs allow you to test your market before a full launch
Before fully launching an ad or any creative promo and campaign, you can execute a mini version of your plan through your blog and see how your audience responds. Suggestions and comments will pour in, giving you ideas on how you can improve and tweak it to better suit your market.
Companies spend a lot of money conducting FGDs and researches. These end up costing as much as—sometimes more than—a full-blown campaign. While blogs cannot replicate the accuracy of professional research groups, they can work well for a lot of market-driven studies.
4. Blogs allow you increased exposure online
The blog network survives on a complex link network. Bloggers are usually fine with linking fellow bloggers that they find interesting. It pays to befriend top-ranking blogs in your category and those that belong in other related categories.
Updated and regular content ensures a high credibility rating.
5. Blogs allow you more room for creativity
Your blog can be the fun alter-ego of your corporate website. While this doesn’t mean a complete dissent from your brand’s identity, blogs allow you to close the gap between how you define your brand and how your market perceives your brand.
