Unlocking the Power of Business Blogging to Build Your Brand
How persistence and consistency can reap rewards
Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from Blogging All-in-One for Dummies by Susan Gunelius (Wiley, 2010). Susan is a frequent contributor to our blog. See her previous posts, “From Return on Investment to Return on Impression” and “The Ultimate Brand Champion.”
A brand is the message, image and promise that your business, product or service consistently, persistently and repeatedly communicates to consumers.
A business blog is an amazing tool for building your brand. Not only does it give you the opportunity to put a voice to your brand, which allows you to develop and meet customer expectations for your brand, but it also allows you to extend your business’ Web presence exponentially. Each new blog post you publish on your business blog becomes another entry point, and with each new entry point comes the potential for more traffic.
As the traffic to your business blog increases, so will the number of loyal readers that your blog attracts, the number of incoming links that your blog receives, and the extent of your business’ online presence. Increased traffic leads directly to building the awareness of your brand to a wider audience who could talk about it, link to your content, tell friends about it, and so on.
Plan to go all-in for the long haul
Much of the power of a business blog as a marketing tool comes from the long-term brand-building effects that a blog presents. For example, a Web search on my name a few years ago would have yielded a small handful of results. Today, a Web search on my name yields tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of results depending on how recently the search engine updated its search index, and that increase in links came entirely from my blogging efforts on both my own company blog and other business blogs that I write for other sources. I went from a non-existent Web presence to a sizeable one in a relatively short amount of time, thanks to the power of the social Web.
There is no secret to achieving that kind of success. It’s just a matter of investing time and sweat into writing great content, interacting with people both on and off the blog, and keeping focused on the long-term benefits of blogging as a tool to build a brand and business.
Your business blog content must offer the same level of brand consistency that all of your other marketing communications do. From your content to your voice and everything in between, a strong brand is one that is consistently presented to consumers. Inconsistency leads to confusion!
Consumers are fickle, but don’t give up
Another critical element of brand-building is persistence. You need to give consumers the opportunity to develop expectations for your brand, which happens organically through persistent (and consistent) brand communications and experiences. After those expectations develop, you must continue to communicate your brand’s messages, images and promises to keep satisfying consumers. You can’t give up.
The unfortunate truth is that consumers are fickle, and they won’t hesitate to leave you if you can’t meet their expectations. By building a brand and consistently and persistently meeting consumers’ expectations for it, you develop a relationship with them that translates into brand loyalty and brand advocacy, which are both essential to developing effective online marketing communications.
Online conversations about your brand can have far-reaching effects. The goal of building your online brand is to start those conversations and keep them going, so there are more and more opportunities for people to find your brand online. After all, there isn’t much point to maintaining a Web presence if no one can find it. That’s like paying for advertising space in a magazine that no one buys. Why waste your time and money unless you’re willing to commit to the long-term brand-building benefits that a business blog can provide?
Instead, focus on the long term when you develop your business blog marketing strategy, and use short-term marketing tactics to enhance that strategy.
— Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a full-service marketing communications company. Susan is also a public speaker and the author of more than half a dozen marketing, branding, social media, blogging, business books, including her newest book, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies, and the upcoming 30-Minute Social Media Marketing. Connect with Susan on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Further reading:
- “Simplifying Your Social Universe”
- “Build a Social Media Treasure Map”
- “Don’t Be Anti-Social”
- “Is Your Org Chart the Secret to Social Media Marketing Success? “
- “7.5 rules for Creating a Great Business Blog”
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[ 3 comments | Categories: Audiences, Guest Posts, Industry Trends, Publisher, Social Media ]
[...] social media corporate blogging’s death knell? True, we’ve had a few positive things to say about corporate blogging now and then. We’re doing it right now, after all. But we may be dinosaurs before we know it. Simon [...]
Great article! very informative. Thanks for posting.
Cheers,Thanks a colleague of mine who is actually involved in the same field told me to shoot over here if I needed some tips (just started). This helped. How can I subscribe?