Still on the fence about whether to start a corporate blog? Well guess what, your competitors aren’t hesitating and they’re stealing your market share. When done correctly, blogging can be extremely valuable to a company especially if one of your brand’s initiatives is to engage in social media marketing. Your corporate blog could become one of the most powerful channels in your marketing lineup. The time and money you invest will reap huge rewards.

The era of the hardcore one-sided sell is over. What’s required now is an open dialogue between brand and buyer. A corporate blog is the perfect spot to show your customers how much you care; that you’ve created an interactive community and that you are listening and addressing the issues that are important to them. For the company, the blog provides a place to frequently update information and engage in a two-way conversation with your customer. Think of the website as a company billboard on the highway and the company blog as your personal direct office telephone line.

Some of the most influential CEOs from the world’s most respected corporations blog because they know how powerful it is. Google, Microsoft, Zappos. Right now, your competitors are connecting with the people who could be your clients.

8 Reasons Every Corporation Should Have A Blog:

1. Consumers Don’t Trust Faceless Advertising.

Transparency is key. Consumers want (are, in fact, demanding!) to hear directly from you. If a consumer can’t trust your brand, and you don’t have a relationship with them, guess what? They move on to the next brand who will treat them with the respect they crave.

Corporate blogging allows an open line of communication between you and your customers and allows a deeper brand experience about your company and your products and services in a casual environment.

Blog posts are not sales pitches, but ongoing conversations. Most likely you and your team possess a passionate voice about your industry, your company making it a more compelling way for customers to interact with the brand. It offers them a real personality who they can connect to on a personal level. When you are passionate, people will follow your lead.

Nothing beats a personal one on one relationship and a corporate blog is a great way to connect on a deeper level with your customers.

A blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style than your web site does, and your readers will soon feel like they know you. The more they know, like and trust you the more likely they are to visit your main site, click your links, visit your store and purchase your product.

2. You Don’t Enjoy Being On The 5th Page of a Search.

Blogs help with page rank and search engine optimization making it easier for those looking for your area of expertise. Placing numerous keywords into your blog is much easier and effective than only placing them on your corporate website.

Blogs provide an opportunity for you to use lots of keywords and phrases because they are updated frequently. This allows your site to be link heavy which provides many more valuable opportunities for search engines to index your site and consider its content valuable.

Most blog engines have built-in functions which automatically notify search engines of new content on your site. This means that blogs provide a direct pipeline into search engines, resulting in a greater chance for indexing and improved page rank.

A corporate blog is a great tool for link-building. Others often reference and link to your blog posts, so by providing content through your corporate blog is a great way to get links from other bloggers in your category.

Most blog engines offer plug-ins which allow for even more search engine optimization than simple keyword heaviness and automatic notification of search engines, including title manipulation, meta tagging, auto-generated sitemaps, and more.

3. Less Qualified People Are Claiming Your Space.

Showcase your expertise. There are hundreds of people claiming authority in your category. If you don’t define your brand for the world, someone else will.

Because new content on your corporate blog should be updated regularly, it is easy, especially with RSS feeds, to quickly provide a steady flow of information to your customers.

This is an opportunity for your company to become the center point for top trends and forward thinking in your category.

Customers are more likely to patronize your brand if you’ve demonstrated authority in your category.

4. Blog Updating is Chimp Simple.

Anyone with opposable thumbs can contribute to a blog. There is no need to know any advanced code or have a degree in advance mathematics. It also makes it very inexpensive to run since you don’t need to pay or wait for a professional to update the content.

5. Little Effort = Big Rewards.

Updating your corporate blog on the business that you are passionate about takes less time than reviewing your teenager’s algebra homework.

We love anything that doesn’t take a ton of time out of our busy schedule. Creating and updating a blog does not burn up a ton of time.

Like I mentioned above, a blog is simple to manage even for the technologically-challenged.

6. You Can’t Afford Not To.

Blogs are inexpensive to create and maintain. There are a number of open sources (read FREE) blog engines available, including wordpress.org (our favorite) that are suitable, when re-skinned (designed to coordinate with the look and feel of your corporate identity), to become an integrated part of your brand website.

However, to make the blog look like your brand, you may need to hire someone to re-skin it and seamlessly integrate it into your existing website. We use and recommend Eric Oliver at http://www.thecosmonaut.com

7. Forget Focus Groups.

If customer insight, feedback, and reaction is important to your company, start blogging to get near immediate results. You can also track the most read posts, which generate the right kind of conversation, posts that are shared most often, etc.

If a customer has something to say, ask or criticize, a corporate blog is a fast and effective way to manage customer relations through the blog comments boxes. Probably most effective is the blog’s ability to deftly manage the spread of a company crisis.

When the corporate blogger responds, it demonstrates the company’s genuine interest in communicating with customers and bettering their services and/or products. It can, over time, change overall perception of a brand.

8. Reach Out And Touch Someone.

Brand awareness is critical to generating sales. Standard thinking is that you need between three to seven “touches” between the brand and the customer before the sale takes place. Because your corporate blog is updated consistently, it offers a multitude of opportunities to connect with your consumer.

As other bloggers pick up and post your articles on other sites, brand notoriety improves.

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The conversation is already happening about your brand, if you don’t join in the social media marketing revolution, and participate with your customers, you will in effect, render your brand mute.

CORPORATE BLOGS WE LIKE:

American Red Cross – (http://american.redcross.org/site/PageNavigator/TheYouthMessenger/BlogandShare)

Zappos – http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs

Frommer’s – http://www.frommers.com/community/blogs/

Amazon Daily – http://www.amazon.com/gp/daily)

McDonald’s – http://www.crmcdonalds.com/publish/csr/home/_blog.html

Do you read any corporate blogs that you think are interesting and insightful? Please share them.