Is Your Blog Working for Your Company and Your Brand?

We recently marked the one-year anniversary of our “Smoke Signals” blog. In celebration of this anniversary, we would like to share with you the success of our blog and how blogging can help boost your business.

Let’s start with recent changes in brand marketing. Let’s take a look at two marketing approaches: outbound marketing and inbound marketing. For outbound marketing, think of television advertisements. How often you do watch commercials? With DVRs, Tivo and your favorite shows streaming online, 68% of viewers are skipping TV ads.

So the question is…why are businesses spending their money advertising there? Maybe your business is not large enough to invest marketing dollars on TV ads, so instead you purchase ad space, buy pay-per-click ads, send out a direct mail piece or cold call to generate sales leads. But is this approach working?

Examples of inbound marketing tools are: blogging, SEO, social media and opt-in email lists. These tools are now proving to be an effective long-term strategy.

Inbound marketing is 60% less expensive per lead than outbound marketing, according to a HubSpot research survey. So if you are looking for ways to cut costs, inbound marketing is a viable option.

How do you build a long-term brand marketing asset? Start with a company blog. In the past two years, blogs have proved to be a top lead generation tool for companies of all sizes. Blogs can help create new customers.

Savvy small businesses are leveraging inbound marketing to stay competitive with larger companies with bigger marketing budgets. The major benefits to a blog are that every post increases your visibility long term. Recent studies show that only 30% of businesses do not have a blog. (If you don’t have a blog that means you are in the minority.) The key to blogging is being consistent and posting content relevant to your industry, customers and prospects.

Most small businesses cannot blog several times a day, so start by blogging once a week. Once you realize that every blog post doesn’t need to be a best selling novel, you can reduce the amount of time per week you spend writing or sharing ideas and successes. You are the expert in what you do. All you have to do is share that knowledge regularly.

Since the launch of our blog, we’ve seen our search engine ranking steadily rise. Showcasing our expertise has increased our credibility and given us industry-wide respect. What better way celebrate a project’s completion than to invite your client to sing your praises on your company blog? Our phones have been ringing ever since.

If you have a blog, the next question is, does it project the same brand image as the rest of your marketing tools?  We believe that a successful blog should do just that. We’ve helped our clients make sure their blog graphics match their visual branding. We are experts in customizing blog themes through programming and CSS styling.

Check out some of our recent blog design projects: