Business Advantages Of A Blog

If you’ve got your own company, especially a smaller business, a blog can be a very valuable way of connecting with your customers and getting your information out to them.

It even saves time and money in its very setup, since a blog takes less time than the rest of your website to design and get up and running, installing the software is less costly than a full-blown web site design, and the blog is a lot easier to maintain and update with your business information.

Add to this the fact that even company newsletters can get bogged down in people’s inbox’s filled with spam, whereas a regularly posted blog bypasses that problem.

It’s Very Easy To Keep Your Customers Updated With A Blog

A frequently updated blog can provide up-to-date information on your products or services, presented in a friendlier, more casual fashion than information elsewhere on your website.

Customers who might not be willing to hunt down dry specifications or product information elsewhere on the site will be more likely to respond to similar information posted in this way.

Rather than reading what sounds like an essay on a product, they’re simply being told about it in a conversation. Another advantage of the blog is that those customers can also ask questions or even make suggestions about improvements to the product. This simply can’t happen on a regular website.

A Blog Is Just A Faster Way To Get Your Information To Your Customers

It’s not that a blog like this is going to become a substitute for the company website, of course. When the final, authoritative word on something is necessary – when those specs on the product really need to be examined in thorough detail – the web page for that item will be there, and all the details can be nailed down.

Nor will the business post its annual report in blog form.

Some types of information work best in certain formats, and other types can be conveyed in different ways.

What a business blog really does is initiate a two-way connection on a slightly more personal level. It can help customers feel like they really matter, in the grand scheme of things. If their opinions are actually solicited, and even better, if their responses are listened to and affect what the company does, customers will feel like there’s a genuine relationship there.

This may be easier for a smaller company to accomplish, though, than a bigger one. A multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees and a multitude of products may not really be able to establish a casual relationship online with even a few of its customers.

Smaller businesses, on the other hand, might in some cases come close to having an almost one-on-one connection with customers.

But the temptation will exist, for a larger corporation certainly, but even for some smaller ones, to make the blog just another PR instrument, with all the posts coming across like press releases. This won’t be effective, and frankly, won’t fool the customers for long.

One of the most under utilized functions of a blog is the ability to directly answer your customers, as the competition online grows one advantage you can have is interacting with your customers through allowing comments on your posts and pages. This can also lead to much more social influence online without much effort on your behalf.

Remember however, your blog doesn’t substitute for the company website, nor will it contain enough information to take the place of more official documents like genuine press releases and annual reports. But it does provide one means of connecting with customers in a way that gives them a feeling that they matter and might even influence the products or services the company provides.