Blog marketing is something that has become a very important area for any growing business. Businesses have been able to really leverage their online appearance by implementing a blog into their website. Blog marketing is really internet marketing using a blog as a promotional vehicle. Companies can use blogs to promote products and services, linking directly to a sales page, or use pay-per-click, affiliate, or banner advertising to generate income from the blog. Typically, corporations use blogs to create a dialog with customers and explain features of their products and services.
Many organizations use blogs with their user community. This allows them to share and preview product features, functions, and benefits before the products are released. Blogs are an excellent way to gather feedback and to make sure products meet the needs of users. Blogs have become the next generation marketing tool to corporate websites which merely post collateral and do not provide any interactive feedback.
There are many advantages of using blogs to market your business but I believe there are also setbacks. A business may have to hire an additional person to keep abreast and maintain the blog. Since blogging is a 24-hour job because people can continuosly comment on it, a peron/persons may have to be put in place to monitor the blogs and ensure nothing is written to destroy the business' reputation and if so, to correct they matter quickly and efficiently. This additional hiring increases the cost to your business as labor costs increases.
This ongoing maintenance of blogs can also be very time consuming. When you post a blog about your business, it takes time for alot of people to reach to it to actually read it in order for you get responses and feedback. With so much competition and other blogs being around, it takes people time to actually read your blog to get information from it and then leave comments.
Misinterpretations of blog information may also occur when blog marketing. Any information posted can be misinterpreted as people have their own opinions and ideas of things. Since feedback and comments are allowed on blogs, by consumers, they may change the idea that you are trying to get across to other consumers, obstructing your marketing strategy for these consumers.
There is also the possibilty that you would not be getting a true evaluation of your market through these blogs, which is one of the main reasons for blog marketing. Your target market, the people you may actually want to look at your products through the blog may not be the ones commenting. Many people do not use blogs or pay attention to them for information especially about goods or services. I can speak on this for myself because I have never written on someone's blog or considered one when purchasing a commodity, in all the years that I have been living.
This website shows how blog marketing does help some businesses.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/aweber-communications-named-2010-american-business-awardssm-finalist-2010-05-18?reflink=MW_news_stmp
I completely agree with you Karina, that blogging is becoming an important part of the marketing strategy for a business. Blogging enables many units internally to collaborate while advertising and releasing new product data externally. For example the site Gizmodo has built their entire business around blogging and have been very successful. Last month one of their editors found a prototype Apple 4g cell phone in a bar, after one of the developers left it behind. They immediately took pictures and posted exclusive detailed information about the next generation iphone. Unfortunately, Apple was not happy about this release and is suing the company; although privately I am sure they are thrilled about the exposure the whole story has reached. Here is a link to the original iphone blog gizmodo posted as well as the complete saga.
ReplyDeletehttp://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone