Give Blogging a Chance
Yesterday a colleague forwarded a post from The Funnelholic, a blog about B2b lead generation, inside sales, CRM, and online media. The author Craig Rosenberg came across The Marketing Consortium, Unica’s now defunct blog where great minds in marketing used to converge.
Rosenberg pondered why the enterprise marketing management company decided to close the blog last September, despite having well-known marketing thought-leaders blog on the site regularly and, as a result, reported high site traffic. In fact Unica’s post on the site reads the blog had “more visitors than we ever anticipated and a steady stream of regular readers.”
I knew that Unica shut down its blog last year, but was surprised at the rationale. Among the reasons Unica gave for closing the blog were that it wasn’t a critical channel, the level of blog readership among marketing executives is questionable, and there was no hard and measurable ROI.
Yes, sometimes you can blog forever and it feels like no one is listening, but it takes meaningful conversations to start a lively discourse among your customers and colleagues. It seems as thought Unica maintained the conversations and site traffic, but the company felt blogging still wasn’t a wise use of its resources and time. Just because it’s difficult to associate hard ROI with blogging, doesn’t mean it’s not working.
I believe blogs are more rapidly becoming critical channels. For one, blogs feed search engine traffic. If you write a keyword-rich blog every day you’re bound to deliver more traffic to your site. Unica’s blog is still delivering traffic almost a year after its close.
Blogs also build customer relationships and brand awareness. They give customers a chance to interact directly with your brand, and, in turn, give your company insight into what customers want and think about your products and services. That is invaluable information that provides honest feedback not always gained from customer surveys.
Monitoring the blogosphere is no longer an option, it should be part of your overall marketing strategy and budget. Think of it as another channel to connect with customers and hear what they’re saying about you, as well as a way to get employees personally involved in marketing the brand--it's a win-win for everyone. It may seem like a lot of work at first, but give it some time to get ingrained into employees’ routines. Once it is, they will not feel it’s a chore to blog and will definitely see the value in it and know that their time is well spent.
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