Every Company Should Have a Blog!

Don't Have a Blog? What you are missing.

Business is evolving. Business is moving from hard copy to digital, from catalogs to PDFs, from pamphlets to YouTube videos, from face-to-face meetings to conference calls. This is not new, but companies need to transition with technology. Business evolution is paramount in order to stay relevant and grow with a changing market and business structure (for more on Accepting Innovation). There are a variety of technologies to enable the transition to digital marketing to create the perfect global message and to build brand awareness for your product. One key overlooked innovation is the Corporate Blog.

A company blog helps build brands, create brand awareness, engage customers, aid in innovation, gain human factors insight, and drives digital research. The key factors for a company to become a leader and to promote its brands/services have not changed, but the form of communication has changed. Establish yourself as an expert, promote, advertise, discern your brand distinction, and build credibility and trust. Creating a company blog adds another touch point to the customer, creates value, develops brand awareness and can help gain valuable feedback.

If you didn’t have reason to invest in blogging or social media before, let me try to convince you with a few statistics from Browser Media, Socialnomics, Pew Internet Project and MacWorld:

• 90% of Americans between 18-29 years old use social media
• 78% of Americans between 30-49 years old use social media
• 65% of Americans between 50-64 years old use social media (with annual growth +15%/year)
• 73% of all Americans use social media
• 64% of Americans stated that social networks had an influence on their buying decision
• 47% of Americans stated that they have provided feedback to a product or service
• 75% of social media users are more likely to purchase a product they have seen online
• 50% of social media users follow recommendations for products or services
• 58% of users are more likely to buy the brands they follow online
• 97% of all consumers research products/services online before making a purchase
• 90% of all research for products/services is done through search engines.

It is statistics like this and many others, that make it clear that social media is influential, powerful and a permanent mainstay in society and business. With 97% of all consumers researching products online, why would any customers (B2B or B2C) not research your products? Furthermore, since 64% of Americans stated that social media influenced a purchase, why would you not want to influence that purchase and be the source of the research?

There is a significant disconnect between the adoption of blogs at large companies versus the rest of society. According to a University of Massachusetts study, only 22% of Fortune 500 companies claimed to have blogs, compared to 45% of Inc’s 500 fastest growing companies, and 80% of non-profits. The study was done for US-based companies; companies outside of the US have even lower blogging rates. Additionally, of the 22% of the Fortune 500 companies who claimed to have a blog, many were void of substance or could not be pubically found.

There many reasons why all companies should have blog and on a corporate level, blogging is a good business decision and can be tied to shareholder value:

SEO: First, it greatly impacts and improves search engine optimization (SEO), so customers can find and give preference to your products and services. Research from Hubspot shows that websites with blogs get 55% more traffic than sites without blogs – regardless of the numbers of readers. Additionally, any content shared on a blog works for the length of the time it is posted – potentially forever, adding to the value of a search.

Engagement/Value-Add: Second, it creates engagement and adds value to your products. By having articles and information which supports your products, applications, services and markets, you are providing a background for your products and building value by being a resource and proving to be an expert in the field. By engaging customers you are eliciting valuable feedback and ideas for future products and continuous improvement on existing products. By engaging your customers, you can constantly communicate with them, without having to constantly visit them – thus reducing costs, creating value and creating brand loyalty.

Product Development: Stemming from customer engagement, a blog can be used to solve customer problems, generate new ideas, and continuously improve. Blogs have the ability to reach a much larger audience and given the proper exposure. A blog message can reach thousands of people, many of whom would not be reached through a standard press release or status update, and can be distributed more freely.

All of the reasons above help build and create brand awareness for your products and services. By creating a corporate blog, you are moving your customer communication to a form which a customer can interact and engage freely with virtually no additional cost. For each customer interaction, a company is defining the human factors of its products and services, learning its customer base, gaining insight into its brands and being at the forefront of all actions between its brand and the customer.

Blogging is a way to build your brand, a way to understand the customer and a way to actively collect and react to feedback. All are good for business. All are necessary to win.

-thePonderingNick