Be Curious

Once you realize that blogging might add something to your marketing strategy. The first step is to find out all you can and to learn from someone who’s already fallen off the bike so to speak, to learn from someone who knows.

Curious about What Blogging Adds

When you find that someone who knows blogging, be curious. Be curious about the benefits of blogging that can’t be met by other parts of your marketing and public relations plan. Blogging expands and amplifies what you’re doing. Blogging doesn’t replace anything.

• Blogging doesn’t inform customers on product detail. That’s what catalogues do.
• Blogging doesn’t close orders. That’s sales.
• Blogging doesn’t spend every word spinning the company story. That’s PR.
• Blogging doesn’t gather formal data and make sure the right words get to the right customers. That’s marketing.

Blogging is about conversation and community. Blogging is an everyday opportunity to interact with customers the way you do at a trade show – only longer, more relaxed, and without the backache that comes with standing on a concrete floor. A blog offers the ongoing discussion with customers and other bloggers from many industries about your business and theirs. It moves you closer to where your audience, or at least a part of them, thinks and lives.

A blog invites your customers to get to know you and your organization in the same way. It becomes hard to not like a company, when you can interact everyday with someone who works there and someone you like a lot.

Blogging stretches your investment dollars and adds new benefits that move toward the same goals. Blogging fills in what we’ve always tried to establish and what those avenues cannot reach — a sense of community, actually knowing what our customers think, need and desire, being in touch with what’s real.

A curious blogger can find out so much from his or her readers. They’re so glad to be asked. When was the last time a company cared about your opinion and talked to you like a human being?

Liz Strauss