Friday, September 27, 2013

Blogging and Me

How a blog could help my company.  By Walker Neer

I currently work as a partner owner/operator in a very small company that is in the service industry.  We provide full service junk removal to the greater Springfield metropolitan area.  Maintaining a blog is something that has been suggested to us in the past. We only have three people working in the business and we are all local, so there is not really a need for an internal only blog.  A blog for customers to read is a concept that has always been intriguing but I have never understood how to create content appropriate for the blog. 

Some of the benefits of maintaining a blog would be exposure, creating brand loyalty and getting customer feedback.  We really have two customer bases, one is residential consumers, who typically use us for a one time need and the other customer base is made up of real estate agents, property managers, landlords, and real estate bankers.   Establishing a blog that people find interesting would be a great way for us to maintain contact with our one time need customers.  While these people might not call every week or month, if we could keep them engaged with us via a blog, we would have a better opportunity to retain their business in the future.  A blog could help us maintain better business to business client relationships , as they use our service more frequently, and a blog provides a way for us to easily communicate new ideas and best practices.  An enthusiastic fan of the blog is also more likely to give word of mouth referrals to their friends, family, and colleagues for not only our service but also the blog.  A blog could prove to be one of the cheapest and most effective marketing strategies available to us.  It would be important to create meaningful, interesting content to keep people coming back.

2 comments:

  1. Walker,

    If you could get customers active in your blog it would also be a good resource to talk about new ideas or new services you company may be offering. A blog could save you money or help you make a good investment based on customer responses to your businesses new or expanded ventures.

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  2. Walker

    Your reference to appropriate blog content for a business is something that I struggle with as well. What type of information would be useful for customers to know regarding your business? I suppose contact information and the types of services you perform. Perhaps even prior customer comments would be good on a blog site. Based on what Jimmy is saying, maybe even future investors could be interested in your business. I, myself, have not really looked to see if a company had a blog or if someone outside the company was blogging about the company. I will say this lesson has opened my eyes to many new possiblities in researching the web.

    Debi

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