Fascinating, exciting and frightening - but Blogs mean Business

This blog is less than a week old, and I've only been investigating the phenomenon (see 80,001 blogs today!) for a few months, but two things are crystal clear - blogging as a marketing tool works, and every company, no matter what size, needs to embrace the blog as a key part of their marketing mix. I'm indebted to Dennis Howlett who, in a number of ways, has been an inspiration. And I'm flattered to see that my company is the example in one of his latest items "ROI - little man v 800lb gorilla". I won't repeat it here, please go and read it there, but it highlights that a company can spend a significant sum on a campaign in a major "publication" and get a pretty good return in conventional terms of "cost per lead". However, a well read blog, like Dennis's, can do a product review because they are interested in the topic, and generate leads at only the cost of some time and effort. A very good return indeed, and the key is that the blog has the right audience of decision makers who regularly come and visit, because there is useful and diverse material there, and interesting comments from the readership.

I'd often heard it quoted that a Saville Row tailor started a blog last Christmas for a tiny sum, and his business has got global PR coverage from it, and grown astronomically. Dennis's piece refers you to a nice broadcast at Marketplace which uses that as one of several case studies. I now know that he was Thomas Mahon, with a blog called English Cut (hey! I just sent a few more visitors his way!). Interestingly, and as I expected, the blog should not be a hard sell, or even necessarily about the product at all. As long as it has appealing content for your target audience, they will come and read, and find out about what you do as a by-product.

The key message is that blogs are cheap, direct and ideal for niche industries. Start ups, small businesses and niche players generally have very modest marketing budgets, so cheap is good. However, it can't be the only lead generation tool. For my company the conventional and the new approach were inextricably linked. I found the company to do the traditional campaign was going to be worthwhile by posting messages on their site. That produced results, which led me to decide to use from for the traditional campaign. The traditional campaign produced results, which was how I made contact with Dennis, and then in turn ended up getting leads from his blog. It's the viral marketing thing. But the trick here is to pick the ingredients properly - use the conventional methods that still work in the current environment and combine that with the fact that blogs means business.

Technorati Tags : Business, marketing, blogs, blogging