I’ve mentioned some of these things in passing a couple times before, but I think it’s high time for a few posts detailing exactly why blogging is so important for any business.
I have to give credit to Frank from A Personnel Connection for prompting this series. We met at our mixer on Wednesday. I mentioned that I’m the blogger for VQC and we got to talking about what blogging can do for business.
I found myself “pitching” company blogging in person, on the fly, for the first time. It’s amazing what I said, because I had never needed to put the benefits of what I do into a short, concise explanation before. (Try it, it’s exhilarating.)
But I did, and now I’ll share what I said with you. In my mind, blogging is the best (and ironically most inexpensive) way to communicate with your customers. Here’s the first reason your business needs a blog:
Blogging Establishes You as an Expert in Your Field.
No one does business with someone they don’t trust.
Whenever you enter into a contract and need the other party to follow through you’re putting yourself out on a limb. It’s a pretty big risk for a business to pay you a lot of money to do a task for them. Before anything is signed or any money changes hands, both parties must be absolutely certain the other will be trustworthy.
So how does this typically work? How do the majority of people pick someone to do business with?
Research.
If your say you’re an expert in your field, your future client can verify that extremely easily if you have a blog. Your portfolio and previous contracts are helpful indicators, yes, but a blog gives the client a direct line into your thoughts.
She has access to different kind of information to help her make an informed decision about your expertise.
Showing that you know your stuff is different from simply saying you do, and a blog is the best way to communicate your expertise. Everyone says they’re the best, or the premier, or what have you, but are your competitors actually showing through their writing that they know their industry inside out?
Now is your chance to do exactly that. Think about it: would you choose a company with no visible marketing experience to handle a very important channel of your marketing (like a website) over one with a blog that gives you marketing insight regularly?
The great blog will definitely factor in the decision.
But in the end the decision to do business with a company is about much more than professional trust and an predicting a favorable outcome. I’ll talk about that second kind of trust in the next installment in the series.