This might surprise you, but this here is a blog. Yes, it’s a business blog, but a blog nevertheless. And it’s one of the best things that we’ve got in our site to help our brand and values reach our target audience.

Then, what’s a blog in the first place and why is it important for my company?

For those that still don’t know what a blog is and in spite there’s a lot of different interpretations around – I’m just going to give mine about what a corporate blog should be -, a blog is a streamline of content regularly produced about a topic or products/services of what a specific brand stands for in a more humanized way to approach the same subjects.

To give you an example, a corporate blog, even though its the perfect place to promote your products and services and you should, it’s much more engaging when you share so much more than that. For instance, even though we help businesses get an awesome web presence, we’re not going to focus on that. We can diverge a bit, talking about things that are still common to the subject but more abstract and giving your followers value.

In this case, however, a blog will help your brand in more ways than one. Let’s check some of the benefits.

Brand Building with Blogs

A blog is a great place for you to share the values and personality of your brand. Want a better way to let your clients, users, followers or subscribers know about what makes you different from the competition? Start a blog, define a content strategy, train some of your colleagues on a blog best practices or ask external help on this and start regularly sharing about what you brand stands for on the different topics and subjects related to your business model.

That’s a great way for people to understand the story behind a brand. As you’re at it, challenge your colleagues to start posting as well. Having a group of people sharing thoughts and articles on your company blog will humanize the brand and give different ways to tackle the problems. It will become interesting for your readers to watch and give your own co-workers more importance and reputation. Giving is a good thing!

The more your team increase their reputation, more decision making feeling is passed to your customers. And your team will also be thankful for having a stage where they can show up and start to create a reputation online.

Provide Knowledge with Blogs

Remember, an informed customer is the perfect customer if you’re doing the right thing. Instead of competing through price, you may demonstrate why you’re more expensive than the other. You can only do so when the customer understands the reason why you provide more value. For that, you need an informed customer.

When a client opts for the cheapest provider over a more professional one evaluating just service price tag, it means that this client isn’t savvy or informed about the actual ROI (Return of Investment) of that particular service.

An informed customer will compare potential service providers (yes) price, brand-safe reputation, features included, quality of the service at hand and especially if at the bottom line, they achieve ROI. There’s a lot of other key points to address as when choosing a business partner, but this is a general idea.

Your Space, your Control

Please, don’t take it personally if I speak about information control in our social era, but I mean a more controlled environment. In a social network, you’re on borrowed space. You don’t control the design, safe brand neighbourhood and especially changes in how you reach your followers. Rules change every day over there.

In your blog, it’s your rules. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’ve got a free pass to do whatever you want if success is a concern to you. If you try to erase nasty comments or abuse your clients, it still is a bad thing, and you should know better. But otherwise, you define the success or crash of your endeavour. Not depending on anyone else.

The tone of voice, design, the way you spread your content is based on your work. Not limited by the features of another platform.

Integration and Communication Central Hub

Try to make a Facebook status update to be spread over other social platforms. If people like your article they will “like it” on Facebook but not shared to Google+ or Twitter for instance, unless they’re using a third-party service like Hootsuite.

So it’s key to have a central hub like your blog to be the Center of all the action and have several social networks and share systems work on that hub. This way, you’re not producing pieces of content that eventually can be hijacked and used for different purposes or even to be used by other people or competitors as if they’re the real creators of that content.

Using that central hub of information and external connections means that it’s also the target of people reaching your page. So take advantage of that and create the necessary links or angles to really leverage this traffic into your desired conversion zones.

For instance, have really in hand the newsletter subscribe field to retain this visitor to know more about your services in the future. Otherwise, he or she may not be impacted by your information again. If you convert them into newsletter subscribers, it means that you’ve got second, third or even four chances to engage with them and inform this person about the value of your product/service.

Also, you may place a few Call-to-Actions to drive them into your further product information. This way, you can also enjoy this fresh flush of traffic to convert them on the spot. Especially if this is one of several articles or brand information about your brand that they’ve seen before, it’s easier than to take advantage of that.

Remember: even though you may not like to pitch about sales and commercially, don’t forget that this is a business and people know about this. If you’re giving so much more value than you’re asking by one or two call-to-actions, they will not mind. If they do, then it may not be the best customer or blog visitor you want in the first place. It’s a little harsh to say this? Maybe, but at the end of the day you’re a business, after all, your goal is to have more sales. Don’t forget that!

Wrapping up

There’s still a lot more that we can use blogs for, but the article is really becoming long, and eventually, it will become a pain to read further, so we’re going to tackle this topic in the future.

In short, a blog is the fastest, seamless and simple way to take your word to your customer or interested parties. So take the space to your advantage and really use that for so many uses.

If you already have a blog, tell us your challenges with it. If you have questions about the subject ask at will and we’re here to help you with it.

Use the comment box below or the contact page and let’s talk about it. We love blogging, and we’re going to do it more often now that the site has been renovated at last.

See you soon again?

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P.S 2: thank you for your time for reading this. Really appreciated!