Blogs can evoke varying images—many of them from the late-1990s and early 2000s (Julie and Julia, anyone?). But dismissing them as a legacy of marketing strategies past risks missing not only a major opportunity but, more importantly, the whole point. An effective blog can differentiate you from your competitors.
So why the hesitation to embrace a blog? I suspect some may be turned off by the word itself—“blog”—which admittedly lands with a thud. But a blog is just a content platform—a page on a business’s website (or a standalone site) that allows the business to put all of its smart thoughts in one place (more on potential sources for these smart thoughts in a future post). Provided the blog stays consistently fresh with new content, it provides natural fodder for corporate social media accounts, too, providing a natural excuse to post.
Which leads to another blog benefit: It allows you to own your audience directly. Sure, you can build a big following on a social media platform, but you don’t really own the data on a social media platform. If instead you utilize your social media accounts to drive traffic (via good blog content) to your website, you can often convert followers into subscribers. Which means you can own your list of subscribers, allowing you to directly contact and interact with them, ultimately giving you more insight into your followers (aka, often, prospects).
Blogs also provide content you can repurpose elsewhere—and you should always strive to repurpose your content. I’ve already alluded to this with the idea that every time you write a new blog post, you automatically have something to share on social media—maybe more than once. But there are undoubtedly additional ways to repurpose that content—perhaps you eventually have enough related content for a series from which you create a newsletter to e-mail to your subscribers. Or maybe you have enough content to compile into a single, larger, research-like paper, which you can then publish on your website and send to interested prospects. (The reverse works well, too—research papers can often be spliced into multiple blog posts.) And so on—the idea is fully leveraging your content to maximize the return on the time invested in its creation.
Finally, and relatedly, a blog is a natural piece of a broader content program—including white papers, research pieces, placed articles, etc.—or it can stand alone. Either way, just because the word doesn’t roll particularly pleasantly off the tongue doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one. But please do call it something else. Blog is an ugly word.
Comments