Putting Foward a Business Case for a Blog

February 25, 2010

Blogs are now extremely commonplace and are part of a large majorty of websites. You may understand the business benefits of a blog, but what do you do if you’d like your organisation to start blogging, but senior management aren’t so sure.

This has happened to a few of our clients, and over time we’ve put together a pretty strong case for a blog. The below is a summary of the business case we would present to someone who is a bit hesitant about blogs:

Why Should You Start Blogging?

• It will allow you to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers
• It will establish trust and build relationship with prospects
• It shows you as an expert and builds authority
• It will provide added value to the people that visit your site
• It will show that you’re up to date on current trends within the industry
• By giving away advice and education it will engender gratitude and loyalty from your followers – which will either be existing customers, or prospects
• It will have a huge beneficial impact on the search rankings of your website
  • Building relevant traffic
  • Increase ranks in major search engines
• It will give you greater brand visibility and can be used as a PR tool
• It gives a more personal face to the business – if you pride yourself on the quality of your employees, why not show them off via the blog

What are the Drawbacks?

• Managing and maintaining a blog takes an investment of time.

How Should You Manage Your Blog?

• Ideally a new post should be published at least once a week without fail.
• To help spread out the responsibility, you could have a different department being responsible for creating a blog post each week. This also helps to make the blog more well rounded; you don’t want it to appear like it’s constantly managed by a ‘marketing droid’, but by real employees with real relevant skills. It will also give an added depth to the blog. For example, if you are an IT firm, some posts could be quite techie which will please the IT/techie customers and prospects reading, others will be more support based which may be of interest to the end users of solutions, others will be sales which will be of interest to the decision makers and people responsible for purchasing  your solutions. There needs to be different type posts from different people to target every type of reader and for the blog to be well rounded
• You should have one person overseeing the blog, who can provide subjects ideas for each post and an outline of how the post can be written
• There should be no strict guidelines to post length – some can be short and to the point, others can be more in depth
• It’s a good idea to create a library of pre-prepared posts that can be published at anytime, allowing a level of flexibility
• You need one person who will be responsible for the maintenance and management of the blog – this will include monitoring and responding to all comments, as well as promoting each blog post using various marketing methods
• You can use free blogging platforms such as Wordpress, and ideally have it hosted on your own domain

Another surefire way to convince management that a blog is the way forward is to do a bit of competitor research. If your key competitors are blogging, then you definitely should be too. And if they’re not, you can be the pioneer, leading the way and getting a nice headstart on them.

If you need help setting up a blog, or want someone to write optimised blog posts for you on a regular basis, please get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or info@SMEketing.com.

Filed under: Blogging

Tags: Blogging