Corporate Blogging to Engage Your Clients
Business websites have grown more complex in recent years and one feature that has become standard is the company blog. Internet users are more comfortable with making connections and forming relationships online now, and smart businesses have been taking advantage of that opportunity to connect more personally with their customers.
A company’s blog can be a useful tool to communicate changes within the business like introducing new staff or featuring new or improved products. They can include information about changes in your niche or industry and can even be used for cross promotions with other affiliated businesses. The blog can be a record of the growth and development of the company that is written in such a way that it makes your customers feel like they are a part of its evolution. This is the key to the success of corporate blogging. It gives a glimpse into the operation of the business and the people that work in it. It puts a human face on the business, so people are more likely to relate to it, making it an important marketing tool.
Regardless of whether you outsource the copy or have staff members that are dedicated to maintaining your company’s blog it must be valuable content that is useful to the readers. That doesn’t mean that the photos from the weekend seminar that the sales department went to can’t be included, but for the most part the blog should focus on topics and issues that are relevant to your business. It is always tempting to post advertising copy on the company blog but unless it is immediately engaging it is not likely to produce many conversions. Instead, posts should discuss topics that your customers bring up with you, that describe new technologies or products in your niche, or that examine the contemporary issues within your industry. In these cases the advertising copy can still be included, but as a part of the larger picture that the blog is creating. While this requires greater subtlety it also creates a greater affinity with the reader, which is more likely to produce higher conversion rates.
Blogs can contain more than just text. Graphics, pictures and videos can add a lot of interest to your blog by making it more interactive with your audience. It can be a great place to gather feedback and it is vital to end your posts with a call to action that asks for comments or presents a poll for readers to leave their opinions. Not only does this engage your readers it also gives you another, very direct source of customer data. A simple example would be if you are selling something that comes in several colors; you could ask people to vote on which color they like best and then stock extra of that color to be ready for any increased demand. People that take the time to leave comments are generally honest in what they say and can point out areas where your service can be improved, or alternative products that they prefer can be brought to your attention.
Because the search engines give a higher rating to fresher material with higher quality content, your company blog is a major contributor to having good SEO for your website. Your blog can also be easily integrated into your social media pages (like your Facebook business page) so that every blog post on the company site is also posted to your Facebook page and Twitter feed, and followers are alerted to the new post. This fact alone can make the company blog the focal point of your online marketing.
