How Can Blogging Help Promote a Business?
Blogging carries with it a history of introspection, with bloggers writing about what is going on in their lives and organizations. For a business, one of the strongest reasons for blogging is to attract and engage customers. Your business blog should contain posts with real relevance to those customers, and that relevance is what helps you serve and attract customers over time. Ask yourself a blunt question: does your content exist for your readers, or for you?
So can blogging help promote a business? It can, but only when the blog speaks to what customers actually care about, becoming a channel for communication rather than a diary. That is how blogging can help promote a business, and it is the difference between a blog that sits idle and one that quietly does marketing work every day.
What Is a Business Blog?
A business blog is a regularly updated section of your website where your company publishes posts on topics relevant to its customers, its market, and the value it delivers. Think of a business blog as a cousin to the personal blog, rather than as a twin. Like a personal blog, it serves as an outlet for expression and ideas. Unlike a personal blog, its purpose is commercial: it connects your organization to customers, provides a direct channel for communication, and helps form strong relationships at every level of the buying journey.
The mechanics are simple, but the discipline is not. Blogging about what you are working on any given day will not necessarily attract more potential customers to your website. Tuning in to the value that customers see in your organization, and using your business blog to provide thought, background, and ideas related to that perceived value, is what interests current customers and even attracts new ones.
How Blogging Can Help Promote a Business
A business blog is one of the many ways to promote brand identity for your business and expand your marketing efforts. It gives your website a reason to be visited again, it gives search engines fresh material to index, and it gives prospects a low-pressure way to evaluate whether your thinking matches their problems. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s guidance on marketing and sales makes the same point in plainer terms: consistent, useful content is one of the least expensive ways for a small business to reach and keep customers.
The catch is relevance. Before customers will care about anything you publish, they have to see themselves in it. So the practical question becomes: how do you consistently find topics your customers actually want to read?
How Do You Get Your Writers Involved With Customers?
Every business has customers. The more you can involve your bloggers with those customers, the more your writers hear directly what is on customers’ minds, and the more naturally they can start writing a blog about your business that lands. This is not about sharing any client’s specific concerns. It is about listening for the issues that clients raise in meetings and turning those issues into blogging topics.
Consider a typical client meeting. The agenda focuses on three topic areas: the client’s sales pipeline activities and building a supportive sales culture; processes for evaluating new opportunities and applying resources against them; and marketing messages and web site copy supporting sales for a couple of product lines. Each of those areas translates cleanly into blog-post ideas, and because the customers themselves raised and engaged with the topics, you already know the subjects are relevant to them.
Business Blog-Post Ideas
More specifically, here are a few business blog-post ideas that derive directly from that kind of agenda and discussion with a customer:
- The Power of Narrative: Why Case Studies Work for Technology Marketing
- How We Test Your Value Proposition and Marketing Message
- How We Write Effective Web Copy for Technology Companies
- Writing Case Studies From Prior Employment
- How Technology Companies Can Generate Leads With Online Articles
- Giving Your Web Site a Job to Do: Using Your Web Site as a Lead-Generation Engine
- Using Shared Workspaces to Coordinate Marketing Projects
- Who in Your Company Should Sign Off on Marketing Content
- Make Your Trade Show Investment Pay Off: Set Up Meetings Before You Go
- When Engineering Companies Grow and Build Sales Cultures
Listen Before Creating a Business Blog
Customers who lean in, sit up, and focus on a point during a half-day working meeting are telling you something. Listening during meetings with customers generates specific, relevant topics that simply reflecting on your own thoughts cannot. Companies that want their blogging to be relevant and attractive to new customers should listen to what current customers are saying, and then continue to engage with customers by following through and writing about it on their blogs.
This also implies that your employees should blog about the aspects of their jobs that require interaction with customers. When that is not possible, customer-facing employees should at least identify and share topic areas based on what they are hearing, so the writers who do publish are never guessing.
How Do You Protect Your Content?
When you create useful articles or blog posts, especially when the author is a leader in his or her field, the chances your posts will be lifted are fairly high. So what do you do about it?
First, figure out your company’s policy on republication. Do you want to restrict it altogether, or is republishing acceptable when your company or author is credited and linked to? Once you know the answer, make it explicit. Consider using Creative Commons to protect your content. The site walks you through a set of options: you choose whether to allow other uses and which restrictions to place on them, such as requiring credit to the author. It then provides an icon and a plain-language explanation of the license to place on your blog post, online article, photo, or graphic.
What Can You Learn From Lean and Six Sigma Blogs?
Reading strong blogs in your own field is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own. At Bizmanualz we write a lot about process improvement, quality, lean, six sigma, and ISO, and the same customer-first principle applies to that material as to any other. The best operations blogs succeed because they answer real questions practitioners are asking, not because they publish on a schedule. If you want a starting point, our own explainer on how lean and six sigma are similar shows the kind of practical, question-anchored writing that keeps a technical audience coming back.
Blogging Can Help Promote a Business
Think of a business blog, like the practical resources at Firstsiteguide, as a cousin to the personal blog rather than as a twin. Like a personal blog, a business blog serves as a valuable outlet for expression. It helps connect writers to customers, providing a direct channel for communication and helping to form strong relationships at all levels. But first, customers have to care about what you are writing about. Get the relevance right, listen before you publish, protect what you create, and a business blog stops being a chore and starts pulling its weight as a way to serve and attract customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Does A Business Blog Help Promote A Business?
A business blog promotes a business by publishing content that is relevant to customers, which attracts new readers, engages current customers, and gives your website fresh material for search engines to index. It works as an ongoing channel for communication that builds relationships and supports your wider marketing efforts.
What Should A Business Blog Write About?
A business blog should write about the topics its customers actually care about. The most reliable source of ideas is what customers raise in meetings and conversations, such as sales pipeline challenges, evaluating new opportunities, and marketing messages, turned into practical posts.
How Do You Find Blog Topics Your Customers Care About?
Listen during meetings with customers and note the issues they lean in on. Involve your writers with customer-facing work so they hear those concerns directly, then turn the recurring themes into blog-post ideas rather than guessing at topics in isolation.
How Do You Protect Business Blog Content From Being Copied?
Decide your policy on republication first, then make it explicit. A licensing tool such as Creative Commons lets you state whether others may reuse your work and on what terms, including requiring credit and a link back to the author.
Is A Business Blog Different From A Personal Blog?
Yes. A business blog is a cousin to the personal blog, not a twin. Both are outlets for expression, but a business blog exists to connect the organization to customers, provide a channel for communication, and build relationships that support the business.
