If you think blogging’s a marketing tool for the future, you need to catch up: because blogging is fast becoming an integral part of any successful business’s marketing strategy. And the danger of not blogging is leaving money on the table and directing all your ideal customers to take their custom elsewhere.
A couple of days a week I work out of Loudons Cafe in Edinburgh. I’m lucky because it’s a brilliant cafe with lovely owners and friendly staff. And handily it’s also situated opposite my husband’s office. So on the days I work in Loudons, Paul and I drop Kimber off at Doggie Daycare (which is just as cute and bonkers as you imagine it is) and drive into town. This morning I was telling Paul about a talk I gave yesterday on the importance of blogging. I was recounting one of the questions I was asked, which was ‘what are the dangers of not blogging?’, when he cut in with a rather succinct, and if I may say so, forceful response! Which was along the lines of ‘the danger is that someone who’s her ideal customer will come on her site and not be able to tell that she’s their ideal accountant. So they’ll go somewhere else.’. This from the man who didn’t consider blogging to be ‘proper work’ not two years ago. Now given that my husband specialises in helping struggling businesses to become viable, thriving businesses: the fact that he now considers blogging to be an integral part of any business’s marketing strategy tells me that blogging is no longer a marketing tool for the future. It’s now very much a mainstream marketing tool of the here and now.
Another recent incident that reinforces this happened when I was speaking to my parents. Every now and then they make an attempt to understand what it is I do, and a couple of months ago they bravely decided to give it another go. Part of the conversation centred around what a blog is, and after a detailed description, light dawned as my father declared that he had read some blogs. In fact he’s a fairly regular reader of certain blogs. And while this isn’t a massive surprise given his keen interest in photography, it highlighted to me that blogging is most certainly mainstream if my 70 year old father is getting his information from blog posts.
But what if you just can’t be arsed to blog? Like the gentleman who approached me after my talk yesterday. Who thought maybe the solution was for me to do it for him, and then balked at the price. This chap has a brilliant product. It’s a tool that would greatly help any number of businesses. But it requires a leap of faith to buy it, which means that if anyone should be blogging it’s him. By regularly blogging he could demonstrate all the great benefits of his product and provide enough reassurance to businesses to take that leap of faith. But he can’t be arsed, so he’ll pay someone to write some generic posts and hope that works. And while it might be better than nothing, I don’t think it’ll help him as much as he hopes it will. Because generic posts don’t tell anyone anything about the company and what working with him will do for their business.
A fact that can be illustrated with a story from my friend, Alice. Alice is in my coaching group and recently shared how she found someone to help her with her website. She’d been having problems with the contact form on her website, and it seemed that enquirers would be told that their message had been sent, but then the message would get lost in cyberspace and never find it’s way to Alice’s inbox. She tried a few fixes on her own, but soon realised that she needed help. So she used Google to search for web developers who work with her website theme and up came a blog post by a chap who loves working with her theme. His post really resonated with her, so she’s hiring him to help her with her contact form, and once he’s done that, she’s got a whole host of web tasks she wants to outsource to him. This was no generic post. This was a post about what he loved about working with a particular theme. This post showed Alice that he was the perfect person to help her.
In a world where we instinctively reach for our phones, tablets, or computers for information, do you really want to be the business who has seemingly nothing to say? The business who directs their ideal customers to someone else’s business. Blogging is here and now. And now is the perfect time to get on board.