Message Matters in a Corporate Blogging Strategy

[Rodger D. Johnson]

Harnessing the power of the blog as a small business marketing strategy makes good sense for many reasons. Less the dollars and cents argument that the value of corporate blogging is an inexpensive marketing strategy to generate more revenue, creating messages that matter will strengthen your customer relations.

Stories That Touch the Heart

A few years ago, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University wanted to know if stories helped charitable giving. According to Chip and Dan Heath in their tome, Made To Stick, "the researchers wanted to see how people responded to an opportunity to make a charitable contribution to an abstract cause versus a charitable contribution to a single person." Subjects in the study gave twice as much to a story about a little girl than to a story laden with statistics, facts and figure. The researchers concluded that people were less apt to give if they were analytically stimulated, and more prone to give graciously when their emotions were activated.

How This Applies To Your Business

While yours isn't a non-profit raising money for a cause, you can still benefit from telling stories and reap similar results. Told well, your stories become viral communication spread from one reader to the next -- that's the real value of corporate blogging. Your message gets seen my more people, by people who like it. Although there are three types of stories I treated elsewhere in another post, "Blogging As A Small Business Marketing Strategy," I wanted to take a closer look at the purpose of blogging as a customer relations tool here.

Purpose of Blogging. The simple fact of blogging for business is to show your customers and prospects that your company can solve a problem. When you do that by telling a story about how your company solved a problem for someone else, prospects with similar problems are more apt to trust you can solve their problem too. And a blog is a perfect platform to showcase those solutions, because people Google for answers. Compendium Blogware cites a Marketing Sherpa report that "80-90% of all clicks happen in the organic section of a search engine page."

Problem-Solution Stories Makes Click-through Possible. At this point, it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that stories about a single customer's problem and how your company solved the problem, told to touch an emotional cord, motivates a prospect to click through to your website or call you. Those types of stories simple do.

Decision-making. Inherently we all make decisions based on some emotional cue. So telling stories that trigger those cues makes sense, if you're blogging for business.

The more stories you generate of customers for whom you have solved a problem, the more prospects (those searching the Net for solutions) will come to trust you and your business. The more trust you build, the better customer relations you build, the more revenue you generate because those prospects will seek you out. Trust is highly emotional. Building that through blogging? Now that's the power of the blog.