Unfortunately, when businesses need to cut back and reassess their budget, the company blog is sometimes the first thing to go. To some, blogging seems like an extra marketing or public relations strategy that isn’t completely necessary. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
A business blog is an incredible asset that can help you reach your business goals and strengthen your brand. In fact, deciding not to maintain a blog can be detrimental to your marketing, public relations and search engine optimization strategy.
Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
If you post fresh content to your site on a regular basis, search engines will crawl and index it more frequently. By simply updating your blog a few times a week, you are inviting search engines to visit your site, index it and rank it among search results. If you are using search engine optimization elements on your site and blog, updating your blog regularly can help you rank for your target keywords.
Better rankings can make it easier for your market to find your website, whether they are looking for it or are simply searching with a general term.
Own Your Message
Your company blog is the ideal place to get your brand’s message out the way you want to. When you share your message through earned media or social media, you run the risk of losing control of your message. Advertising efforts like billboards, site ads and commercials can be buried by the noise of other businesses or more readily ignored by your market. However, your blog is a place of authority, where your market can go for legitimate and correct information and messaging that you control.
Claim Your Property
Depending on properties like Facebook, Twitter, forums and community spaces for your marketing efforts is risky. You don’t own these properties, so you don’t have very much control over how your content is displayed or even used. You also don’t have any control over how long your content will remain live, as these types of sites come and go over time. A great example of this is Posterous’ announcement that it is shutting down. Users do have a chance to export their content, but if your brand relies on a site like this to reach its market it will have to start working to gain an audience and fan base all over again on a different channel.
Keeping a company blog is well worth the time and effort it takes to maintain the site, update the content and correlate its calendar with the rest of your marketing and public relations campaign tactics.
Image courtesy of Kris Olin/Flickr.