Why do businesses need blogs?

By Abhinash on October 28, 2011

There are numerous reasons why businesses should use weblogs as a tool for marketing and communicating their products/ services. The most commonly cited reason was that corproate blogs allow marketers to personalise the feedback channel by opening the door for direct conversation with consumers (Lamb, 2009). Other benefits of corporate blogging are (Karr and Flannery, 2010):

  • Blogs can provide latest information on products that leads to a direct sale from the blog post
  • Blogs help raise awareness of the company’s expertise in order to attract and acquire customers
  • Blogs may provide valuable information to stockholders in order to maintain a good public image and attract more investment.
  • In case of large scale organisations, corporate blogging offers several other benefits: leadership blogs that speak about the company vision to employees and stockholders, customer service blogs dedicated specially to assisting customers and marketing blogs that promote upcoming events and integration.

Remenyi (2008) concentrates on a different attribute of blogs, which she states is also its biggest advantage: they are a low-cost means to achieve the marketing aim: for producing content, for promoting the product, for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes, etc.

Potts (2007) lists several other benefits of corporate blogging: Blogs are a channel to deliver news much faster than any other medium; gains customer insight on the subject as it strikes a conversation with them and helps increase traffic to their website.

Reference

  • Lamb, C.W. (2009): “MKTG”. Published by Nelson Education pp 514
  • Karr, D; Flannery, C. (2010): “Corporate Blogging For Dummies”. Published by Wiley. pp 22
  • Remenyi, D (2008): “Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation” Published by Academic Publishing Ltd. pp 150.

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