5 Reasons Why Your Company Needs A Blog

853 days ago by Sarah Chong, in Business

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Should your company start a blog?

This question is a tough nut to crack. You might not need to fork out a cent but maintaining a blog can be enough to cause a nightmare.

Either companies rather not think about it or they just don’t see the true benefits of owning one.

If the latter is the case, these 5 reasons should help clear some fog and get you the much needed nudge to start one.

1. It keeps your customers updated

A blog is a great way to keep your customers updated. Every time you have an improved feature or a new product launch, a blog post can help to clarify all the “what, why, when, where and how” questions. Most importantly, don’t just talk about your product, people love to hear stories from within your company too. In other words, a blog will also help customers understand your company better.

2. It keeps your staff updated

If you’re running a large company, a blog can help keep your staff updated. Training schedule and internal company news can be released through an internal blog post. Emails are great but isn’t writing a blog post a much simpler method?

Remember to separate your internal company blog from the external (public) one. Some things are confidential or should just be kept private.

3. It improves your web traffic

A blog integrated within your corporate website can help improve your overall web traffic. People who visit your blog are likely to visit your ‘product page’, or at the very least, your ‘about us’ page as well. This increases sales probability.

4. It establishes your company as an industry leader

Majority of the people search online content through a search engine. If someone needs a solution to reduce weight, the first link that appears from the search engine is likely to be clicked and recognized as a quality source of information (since the search engine ranked it 1st).

Likewise, through blogging, you too can provide solutions and tips for your potential customers. In the long run, if your posts provide great content, your company will certainly gain credibility along the way.

5. It is a good start to social media engagement

A blog is a useful tool to start your social media marketing campaign. It gives you the content to communicate with the outside world using other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Check out our KISS strategy to gain some other insights!

Tags: Blog, Business, Social Media

About Sarah Chong

Co-founder and editor of Penn Olson. A laid-back marketing student otherwise. Loves social media and twitters about everything! (yes even about the stranger who chants to himself) A huge Harry Potter movie fan who is extremely scared of geckos.

View all posts by Sarah Chong →

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tishrobinson

Corporate blogs can be terrific. I agree with you on your points. However, they can be very, very expensive in terms of time. I started (and run) corporate (consumer) blogs for two companies and I can tell you that the work involved (if you want a nice looking blog site with photos) is huge. I recently counseled a freelance client of mine against starting a blog because of the time commitment. Many companies are stretched so very thin in terms of employees available to do the work. A good consumer blog takes a full time person — not just planning/setting it up, but keeping the content fresh and frequent, finding or taking good photos to make the site and each post attractive, and spreading the word about each post on social media. Then there's the linkbuilding that you need to do. It's a lot and companies should go in with their eyes wide open to both the benefits and the time commitment. In some situations, a good FB pages might do the job.
My blogs are http://simplephotogifts.com — only a few months only and http://travelswithtish.com (more than 3 years old and still running).

On the other hand, I think an internal blog for employees is a great idea — that doesn't have to be as labor intensive. I could see a marketing person writing it off the top of their head quite easily — keeping employees in the loop on new products, processes, customer issues, customer service tips and more. Would be a valuable internal communication tool.
http://twitter.com/williswee Willis Wee

thanks for the great comment tishrobinson! A blog is indeed labor intensive. But it also depends on the company's objective for the blog. it will be less intensive if the blog's purpose is to showcase the company's culture compare to one that is giving consumers tips advices
Clemence Ko

I can see your point there. I also agree with you tishrobinson. However companies can have 2 blogs. 1 for employees only and the other is for general public. In order to be less labour intensive, the company can merge their feedback or customer service department together to the blog. The blog can be used as a platform for customers to voice their feedback, ask for help etc in addition to the normal call in.

About the linkbuilding i think the company can don't put so much emphasis on it first. It will goes on viral by itself once the blog start to have more comments and exposure overtime. They may leverage their current database of loyal customers emails (if they have) to spread their blog.

For content wise, they can have spotlights like employee of the month, great customer service case study on employees giving great services, a peek into the everyday running of the company, informing the public of interviews about the company etc etc etc. Or use the tactics of customer based blog. Have a panel of volunteers (who are your customers) as guest bloggers.

My conclusion here is though i also agree with tishrobinson that a blog is labour intensive, there are innovative ways the company can reduce that. To me a company blog is very essential. I would rather my customers complain and rattled on about my poor services etc on my own platform instead of their own or public platforms that our company can't or keep track of.
http://www.facebook.com/senderok Senderok Allen

Sometimes, however, the marketing person (not to mention the salesperson) is deep into negotiations on potential big deals and doesn't want to tip anyone's hat – that is when plain vanilla marketing text seems safer. We just updated our Facebook page with images of a new article written about us…but the blog is more than a month unrefreshed because we can't exactly reprint that article as our own content. I could write on the blog about our impressions of GoogleWave and other Google Gmail developments that most approach what we're doing cross-platform…but then many of my thoughts would = internal company thoughts. – And that is where the rub is with company blogs. Info has either been cleared for public consumption or it might not be a great idea to ruminate online about it. Tweeting is a different story because one can make one sentence comments which don't pressure the writer into digging deeper into company information.

That said, I will consider updating the blog very soon with a suitable topic.

By the way, besides WordPress.com, can someone list the best places to start a blog these days that gets fast search engine spidering and links?
amorel

It is in a company's best interest to hire a viral marketing management agency with strong creative and marketing strategy to take over a blog and/or its social network pages in order to use these 'free' tools effectively to the businesses benefit. Consistency and regular visibility is important for all companies thinking about the future and growth. I know of a great one- called Splenditty.com.