Blogs - A World Platform Marketing Tool

When the social web used worldwide as Web 2.0 is personalized for business intentions to create awareness and get first hand opinions of all those who matter, business blogosphere emerges.

Blogs are conversational marketing tools for all kinds of businesses that are open to transparent communication between the business and their prospective customers. On blogs, conversations between stakeholders, partners and customers are open-ended, explanatory and two-way interactions. As a result blogs impart an online human face to businesses. They represent reflective leadership, take feedback on various internal and external proposals and issues, impart information to current and prospective customers and give them a platform to comment and communicate. These communications provide valuable marketing research clues for business development.

Some reasons for choosing blogs as a powerful marketing tool are:

Blogs allow direct and informal communication with potential customers
Blogs have the power to establish customer loyalty through better understanding of your business.
Blogs are collaborative in structure and they bring insights into customers’ needs and desires.
Blogs make a company appear more approachable.
Blogging creates a side benefit of Increased On-Line Traffic to your website by improving search engine ratings.
Business blogging works extremely well for small business and entrepreneurs because blogging can establish a strong bond with channels, partners, prospects, and existing customers.
Business blogging gives greater visibility, wider reach and credibility thus leveling the playing field with larger businesses.
Business blogging provides accessibility and global attention to very small businesses.
Blogs can build a rich database of contacts for individuals and companies.

There are many compelling success stories, like www.cleartrip.com and www.sulekha.com. Cleartrip executives and employees blog at http://blog.cleartrip.com/journal/ and they do not delete even nasty comments from customers to encourage transparency.

The following information will be helpful to any organization considering the use of a blog to enhance their marketing research.

Ask yourself - Do a large number of prospects access the net regularly? More feedback provides better data.
Make an honest assessment of your organization's commitment to making a significant improvement in marketing results?
Will the organization foster open and honest communication with prospects and customers? Blogs are for transparent conversations and trust building.
Two no-cost platforms for blogging are www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com.
Social networking infrastructures like www.orkut.com provide for the formation of communities to get interactive communications from the target market.
You can also set up a blog on your own website. This is inexpensive but more credible. This also saves moving content later if you decide to blog from your own URL.
Blogs can be written conveniently like a MS Word document and published through blog posts, newsletters, polls and more.
Entrepreneurs can choose blogs as an inexpensive marketing tool for projecting the marketing of their products and/or services globally.

Blogs are valuable for social networking and internet marketing. They are an excellent means of building customer awareness, market credibility, business relationships, and a wealth of valuable marketing data.

Blogs - A World Platform Marketing Tool

Date Added: August 14, 2007 07:56:04 PM