The Business Case for Blogging
In Should You Be Relationship Marketing we discussed the four perspectives of marketing your business:
- if we build it they will come
- we will sell what we make
- we will make what we can sell
- we will provide a 360 degree relationship approach
In short, the transitions along that path will have a great impact on how well your business meets its goals and objectives (or makes a profit). If you’re a web developer, for example, you could see that filling holes in the market and developing relationships might be a logical progression from your first foray into just building websites where you might have expected clients to miraculously arrive on your doorstep.
The next question arises – does your business need a blog? Which in some part is answered by looking back at those four business perspectives. Yes your business should be blogging and it needs to be a part of your business strategy which is financed by your advertising and marketing budget. Like any business process it needs to be answerable in business terms – return on investment (ROI).
Your business needs to appreciate a blog can provide critical links to all the stakeholders in your value chain -
- customers can be updated about your core products or competencies
- you can deal with complaints or misconceptions quickly and in person
- your expertise or broad knowledge can be established
- stakeholders can appreciate your values, ideas and creative ability
- you can use feedback gained from stakeholders to improve
- blogging establishes there is a real person in your e-business to contact
- and, it all contributes toward the objective of building relationships
Blogging is definately the best bang for your buck marketing tool out there particularly for a small to medium business who lacks the corporate cash flow. But it has to be used effectively, which links back to those four business perspectives. What is your business trying to achieve? If its relationship marketing then this is a communication channel you can use to good effect.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Good article mate with plenty of relevance – because it is important for businesses to get a blog for the right reasons…and not just to get one for the sake of ‘keeping up with the Jones’. They have to be thinking how to get the most from a blog (including the ROI) before they get one (otherwise they are wasting everyone’s time – especially their own). I wish more businesses ‘blogged’ on the web (would definitely be a good thing)…but I also wish that more would assess their online marketing strategies before getting a blog at all.
Good to write about this Steven – nice one.
September 17th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Hi Matt
I find its really hard, particularly with small businesses, to get the business perspective thing over to them – what do they want to achieve? how do they measure that success? And web developers in many cases aren’t bothering to worry about the business process side of the project either – client’s issue? Basically its the first conversation I try to get involved in when someone phones with an interest in getting online… and in some cases I just tell the potential client they don’t need me. Or have done so as I’m too busy to take on more work at the moment.
I think web developers provide a service and its probably not economically efficient to knock back clients BUT we are also morally obligated to try and provide the best solution to our clients. This involves seriously looking at whether or not this will address their business needs. It gets really disappointing to see there are a numerous people out there quite willing to waste clients money by giving them just anything (no I probably don’t have a big future at this as a freelancer lol)… its why I get so frustrated when generic solutions like Content Management Systems are touted to clients before they’ve even discussed their business issues…
We create web solutions and that translates to answering web problems for the client, so our first criteria to address is ‘what is the clients web problem’?
Whether they get onlinen and what they need from the solution should be everything about ROI and Key Performance Indicators (KPI)…
Thanks for commenting Matt.