Blogging – Much More Than What Your Business Does

Five pieces of primary information consumers use to choose a business, RevLocal says, include:

1. price
2. products and services offers
3. availability of service
4. customer service
5. location

Coupons and offers are important, as are testimonials and reviews, RevLocal adds. “Customers want to know about your business and its history. You don’t have to write an essay, but give a brief history of your company and its core values so that consumers know enough to trust your business.” (Our Say It For You blog post earlier this week makes this very point.)

“Marketing has never been more about compassion, Shama Hyder of fastcompany.com cautions, with successful marketing requiring appealing to consumers’ emotional side. Companies must show that compassion and accountability are part of their underlying mission. Hyder cites financial institution Experian, whose business model is dedicated to addressing financial disparities in the credit system by making credit scores more inclusive.

Blogs are actually the perfect vehicles for conveying compassion, because, as guest blogger and e-commerce businessman Nick Semon wrote, “Blogging allows businesses an informal and efficient way to communicate a wide variety of ideas and topics…Our customers expect a hassle free shopping experience.  They don’t want to see a bunch of clutter when purchasing our product. Blogging allows us an area to communicate much needed information away from the store front but still very much integrated into our business.

In fact, the best website content and the best marketing blogs, we teach at Say It For You, achieve a number of different goals:

• building good will
• staying in touch with existing customers and clients
• defining values
• announcing changes in products and services
• controlling damage when it comes to negative PR or complaints
• recruiting employees
• In short, the blog should give readers insight into a company’s core beliefs in addition to information about products and services that company offers.

Blogging should be about much more than what your company does – it must also be about who your company IS!