When you are working on ways to create a community around your brand or service, a blog is an effective addition to your communications and marketing strategy. Understood as a community building tool, the blog is a natural extension of your core message and a way to communicate with your audience, an audience you have identified, targeted and are working to cultivate.
What may be less obvious when you are examining the role that a business blog should play in your overall communications and marketing strategy, are the other audiences to which your blog can and should speak. These unexpected audience for your business blog include the press, your industry peers, and search engines. Think about how you are communicating with all of your blog readers and how you can use your blog as a relationship builder that goes beyond business- to-consumer.
Press
The more that you use your business blog as a vehicle to demonstrate your expertise, to educate your audience and to provide information about your industry through the lens of your expertise, the more you become a trusted resource. While it is essential to position your business as a trusted resource to your clients and strategic partners, it is also valuable to position yourself as a resource that is trustworthy, capable, and available to the press that covers your industry.
A content rich blog that delivers accurate, valuable information about industry news, including trends, expert opinions, emerging technologies and other kinds of verified information from an expert perspective, is exactly the kind of resource that industry press crave. By managing your blog content with this in mind, you are more likely to be sought out as a source for stories related to your industry.
Earned media opportunities like this are invaluable. They set you and your business apart from your competitors, validate your expert claims, and give you access to a larger audience of prospective clients and partners, all through a trusted, neutral third party.
Industry Peers
Your industry peers who may be and often are reading your blog (assuming you are maximizing the power of your blog with relevant, well written, accessible content) include partners and prospective partners, as well as your competitors. A well curated blog with good content creation does not just attract the people who want to work with you as strategic partners. It also attracts others in your field who are doing work similar to yours.
In the space of the blog, you are able to position yourself as an expert, shine a light on news relevant to your industry, and demonstrate the value that you provide. For colleagues and competitors within your industry, your blog becomes an additional resource for gathering information, for checking out the competition and for furthering conversations that, ultimately, keep you relevant and involved, and keep the community around your brand interested and engaged.
Blogs present a wealth of opportunity for businesses to stand out from the crowd online. The more content rich material you provide on your site that is relevant to your audience, the better your search performance becomes. Including blog content in your SEO strategy is a smart way to make your communications and marketing strategy, and your overall digital strategy, work hard for you and deliver returns on investment.
But as much as a business blog has value in your SEO strategy, it is important to remember that a business blog needs to be authentic, honest and accurate, in order to demonstrate that value from the perspective of your SEO needs and your communications and marketing goals. What you say online needs to be verified and verifiable offline. Respect for your audience, from your clients and partners, to the press, your competitors and even the search engines, needs to be at the core of every communications and marketing decision that you make for your business.
Every message we share is an opportunity to gain trust. Do not squander that opportunity
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