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Todd & Debbie , Owners, Grocery Outlet San Leandro
How Your Business Can Benefit From Blogging
Posted in: Blog, Blogging by Althea Tan
Blogging has been steadily rising in importance since its inception a decade ago. Back then, blogs were no more than static pages constantly updated by the blogger by editing the HTML code. WordPress and Blogger were not available to make the blogger’s work easier.
Now, blogging has become a common activity — thanks to new technology that made it easier for bloggers to create mini sites of their own, complete with pages for a business blog, an ‘about’ section, a contact form, and even a mini directory of links to other web pages.
Is there a market for your business blog?
In a 2008 study by eMarketer, the number of U.S. bloggers will increase more or less 2 million every year. As this number increases, so will the number of blog readers. By 2013, the number of blog readers is set to increase by 10%.
Having a business blog in your corporate marketing strategy can be very beneficial for both the company and its customers. The blog serves as an online public relations medium for corporate news, press releases, and even personal messages from the company’s executives.
More than that, a business blog maintains a well-balanced relationship between the company and its customers: it serves as the avenue for the company to answer questions, assist new clients, and address complaints from customers. Constant communication between company and its consumers brings out issues early on. This gives the company time to fix the problem and avert a possible PR disaster.
How do you know who your blog readers are?
The eMarketer statistics, and parallel studies done by PEW Internet and American Life Project (January 2009) and Universal McCann (April 2008), presented only the numbers of bloggers and blog readers. The statistics failed to identify the demographics of blog readers, i.e., sex, income levels, and marital status.
Fortunately, the popular blog network, Technorati, also publishes its own State of the Blogosphere (STOB) report, which includes the kind of demographics businesses love to see. According to its 2009 SOTB report, two-thirds of bloggers are male with 60% between 18 and 44 years of age. The majority of them are more affluent and educated than the general population.
If these are the types of readers in the entire blogosphere, expect the quality of blog readers that you may have. Knowing the statistics is valuable when you run a business blog.
For a general idea of who your blog readers are, you can turn to services like Blog Reader Project, which helps you identify the demographics of your readers through a survey and track them whenever they visit your blog. Another equally valuable tool is Demographics Prediction Tool from Microsoft AdCenter Labs.
Although at first you may have doubts on how a business blog can benefit your company in the end, do not hesitate to take the opportunity to reach out to your customers. Blogs are now part of the social media culture and are rich sources of information that you can use in strategic planning as well as avenues to reconnect with your customers.