Should My Company Start a Blog? PROS v CONS

We get asked a lot if a company ‘should’ blog. The simple answer is this; something’s always worth doing if you’re going to do it well. Let’s go through the pros and cons of starting a blog for your business.

Why do companies blog?

In times gone by, blogs were seen as a personal diary that people just wrote for their own amusement, but that has drastically changed. The whole idea of content marketing (or a 'blog', ‘Latest News’, ‘Journal’, or whatever you want to call it) is to keep people in the loop about that latest developments at your company and to establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry.

Pros

• Brand Awareness
  Blogs are a great way to create and publish content that people can share to their friends, family and followers. If you make it entertaining, informative and engaging, you stand a great chance of taking your content viral and getting seen by people and showing them what you do.

• Showing Off Your Culture
  Some industries are more crowded than others. If you can demonstrate the more human side of your company, while still keeping on-message, clients are more likely to resonate with you than your competitors. If there are two coffee shops on the same street, both offering great coffee, but I can see that one has a bit more personality, I’m more likely to get my skinny-latte from them.

• Soft Selling
  If you’re a company that offers advice on a particular topic, what’s the best way to get potential new customers to believe you have the expertise they’re looking for? TELL THEM! If you can demonstrate expert knowledge in your industry, people are more likely to trust you, therefore more likely to do business with you – without being too sales-y.

Cons

• Time and Labour Commitments
  Setting up and optimising your blog, coming up with a content strategy, adding high-quality images and regularly publishing engaging content is not easy. Running a blog should be a legitimate string to your digital marketing bow, not just palmed off on someone “because you think you should start a blog”.

• Spamming
  It’s really tempting to just talk about what your company do, the offers you run and the products you sell, but there’s only so much of that that potential customers can take. Be sure to vary your content to include more “off duty” content.
   
• Visibility
  It’s all well and good starting a blog, but if you don’t make your posts visible to your intended audience then all your hard work may have been in vain. Whether it’s creating your blog so it gets emailed exclusively to site registrants, publishing out through your social media platforms or making sure it’s easily searchable on your homepage, including your blog posts in your overall digital marketing strategy is crucial to making it a success.

Conclusion

If you can fit a blog in to your overall digital marketing strategy, do the research in to how to best attach one to your site (or social), and promote it in the right way, there's no reason you shouldn't start a blog for your business. Just make sure it's of use to both you AND your target audience.