Let's be clear; most businesses want its blog to generate sales for the company. Either directly or indirectly. But some of the biggest benefits that can be achieved via a blog is to use it as a tool to reduce the cost of running your business. Here are three ways this can be done:1 - Your blog as a customer service/support tool. Think about how much time and money and energy is spent on handling customer service issues. With a blog, you can handle most of these issues, giving customers the ability to find the answers for themselves, saving them time and energy as well. A win-win for everyone, as this always improves the customer's impression of your company, and makes them feel cool as well since they could solve the problem themselves! In the book Groundswell, the authors calculated this benefit alone as being worth $69K a year to a large blogging corporation.
2 - Organic SEO benefits. Everyone knows that blogging has big SEO advantages. But the organic SEO benefits from your company blog could be enough that you could scale back on the money you're paying that SEO firm, or even stop outsourcing your SEO efforts! That means you can take that portion of your marketing budget and move it to other areas!
3 - Free market research! One of the first things you'll hear about social media is that 'it's all about the conversation!!!' Ok I agree, there's so much more to it than that, and it's often hard to directly monetize 'the conversation'. But here's one area where customer feedback can pay off on your blog, and that's in the form of free research! Think about it, if you have a vibrant and active readership on your blog, then you can use your customers to get insights into new products you are developing, existing or possible marketing campaigns, or really anything! Click here for an example of this in action with the recent social media survey I conducted on MackCollier.com.
So keep these ways in mind when you are considering launching a company blog, or are trying to sell your boss on doing so. Don't just consider the potential revenue generated, but also the potential to lower the costs of running your business!
10 comments:
Great stuff!... I think this is a great way to star selling the idea of corporate blogs to companies that are still not using them.
thanks for sharing
regards
aureliano
Yes Aureliano I think everyone is focused on 'selling more stuff' with a blog, but these companies often overlook the value of lowering costs. And there's also the PR value tha twill be generated by posts written about the company and its blog.
Thanks for the great post. This is some really useful information and I agree with what Aureliano says. There is so much a company can do with a corporate blog and using these points is a great place to start.
Thanks for your post. It's really very helpful for me.
We often forget that there are two aspects of a business case. You can reduce cost or you can generate sales. Both create profit. It's nice to be reminded in cost-conscious times ;)
Thanks for sharing you ideas. I think these three ways which you mentioned are very essential to cut down the costs the business. I will definitely implement them.
I'm not sure I can agree with #1. I really dislike it when companies make me work for customer support by providing general answers I have to root around and which may not address my question. I don't feel good that I solved it myself; I feel annoyed that the company doesn't provide real support, and I'm not alone in this. I'd have to see a really good example of this.
What surprises me is that we still need to write posts like this. These should be oblivious to everybody by now, but as we can see, they are not. So keep on writing!
Very, very useful for any business trying to get to grips with social media marketing
customer service issues can partially solved by creating a blog.
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