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“Blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.”
--BusinessWeek .
As advertising and mainstream media effectiveness continues to decrease - and,
counter-intuitively, costs continue to increase - digital media is accelerating in
influence. Gartner Group reports that 58% of senior executives consider the Internet
the most important source of information on business. And since we know that
search engines are the primary vehicle used for researching B2B solutions, and
weblogs or ‘blogs’ are more frequently topping search engine results, it makes sense
to consider a blog as part of your marketing mix.
What distinguishes a blog from other marketing vehicles is its potential to accelerate
the awareness to lead-conversion cycle at a relatively low price point.
Blogs are a digital medium used by businesses for media, marketing and
communications. Depending on the platform, blogs can incorporate viral and emarketing
tools ranging from “email this post” to digital campaign management. The
essence of blogging, to quote Six Apart Vice President, Anil Dash, is to “connect with
the audience[s] you care about.”
Blog entries are essentially interactive web pages, with links, comments, trackbacks,
syndication and blogrolls accelerating the spread of information. Blogging platforms
are multi-media and support text, images, photos, audio (“podcasting”), and video.
In short, blogs enable your audience to access the content they want, when they
want it - ideally, in their preferred format. The self-service aspect of blogging is
significant: firewalls, spam filters and email certification are non-issues.
Three factors distinguish blogs from other forms of communication: immediacy,
frequency and engagement. Blogging is a real-time activity. Once a blog is set up,
posting an entry is virtually as easy as writing an email. The frequency of content
updates and quantity of inbound links drives search engine optimization. Indeed, it’s
such a core attribute that bloggers joke that ‘blog’ stands for ‘better listing on
Google.’ Both the nature of the blogosphere and the platform architecture enable
more effective engagement - dialog versus monologue - relative to other
communications media.
As marketing continues to evolve into a constituency management practice, blogs
will increase in relevance and usage. Blogging has been proven to drive key business
ROI metrics, including what CMO Magazine reports are the top 6 tracked by US
marketing executives: customer satisfaction, market share, site traffic, sales
feedback, brand awareness and qualified leads.
Although no medium should be used in isolation, blogging is emerging as the most
efficient, cost-effective means of influencing fragmented audiences. For most
businesses, it’s not a matter of if but when.
