Once upon a time, a big part of marketing was simple publicity, getting your name mentioned in print or over the airwaves, as one means among several for establishing a public profile. Blog marketing, frankly, is not so different – but the how and the where of the work has changed, naturally.
Old-school marketing consultants tended to search the "landscape" to determine how and where they could best advertise a client's business. That, of course, is not a full-scale marketing effort, one classic definition of which is "creating a relationship with the customer," and another, "creating the environment for a sale." Truth be told, the online world is not that different. There are important relationships to make and mine, but the goal has evolved along with the environment.
As far as the "online market" is concerned, it is no longer a marketing professional's primary job to coerce or cajole people into talking about certain products or brands. First and foremost, blog marketing is now about producing content that your target demographic finds useful, and guaranteeing its ongoing high quality.
Usefulness and dependability
A blog marketing professional will introduce the blog to various social, professional, and special-interest sites. The goal over a specified period of time is to drive truly bottom-up, "organic" discussions, and not about the blog or the author(s) so much as the content and its usefulness. If one can position a blog and its author(s) as authorities on a particular, specific subject – a subject of interest to a measurable, identifiable, and hopefully underserved niche – the chances of the blog drawing additional visitors and potential clients to the company's main site are significantly increased.
When other people start talking and writing about your blog; when you are getting phone calls you didn't get before, asking questions about it; when you begin to get site visitors based on both personal and professional recommendations, your blog marketing efforts are paying off – measurably! In a triumph of common sense over technological flash, it is good, solid, dependable information that people want from the Internet, not endlessly precious Flash animations.
Rational exuberance makes sense
In a mass of mis- and disinformation, it takes a voice of calm authority and, pace Alan Greenspan, rational exuberance to bring dependable and useful information to a truly underserved market. The right combination of copy, collateral. and communication is essential, but the fundamental strength of the enterprise is the expertise of the blog producers and writers.
Team a talented wordsmith with some savvy and experienced legal minds, for example, and a very useful blog could be fabricated in no time. WordPress and similar Content Management Systems make the process streamlined and efficient.
Content is king, and that's not even a new saying. It's a correct one, though, and applies to every enterprise in the virtual universe, bar none.
No comments:
Post a Comment