You’ve got a Facebook profile, claimed your business on Google Maps and Foursquare, and you may even have a Twitter account. So far, your businesses is well situated to use the internet and social platforms to generate business and raise awareness of your brand.
But there is one other platform where your business is absent: Blogs.
The natural inclination of businesses is that blogs are time-consuming and labor-intensive. I won’t dispute that — blog posts require time and effort to write and publish.
But the benefits to maintaining a company blog are considerable. Consider the following:
After a few too many months of hiring inactivity during this “Great Recession”, Renaissance is pleased to announce that we’ve added a new Team member! Ben LaMothe has joined our firm on a part-time-to-hopefully permanent basis as an online marketing and social media strategist.
Ben has been a guest blogger for such prestigious online communities as Media140.org, Econsultancy.com and FreshNetworks.com. His areas of expertise include developing and implementing unique strategies in Social Media Marketing; Multimedia Content Creation, Distribution and Aggregation; Blogging; Online Community Development (internal and external); Customer Relationship Management (CRM); and Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM). Ben has worked in industries ranging from non-profits, to farming, IT, luxury marketing, academia, news media, textiles and destination resorts.
In challenging economic times, the natural response of many companies is to cut back on marketing. A new survey by the American Association of National Advertisers reported that 77% of marketers plan to reduce their media budgets in 2009. In fact, down economies are when businesses need to increase their marketing efforts. Marketing during periods of decline not only enables companies to more easily capture the limited amount of available work during slowdowns, but also to increase market share permanently, when conditions improve.
Not long ago, as part of an art presentation I was giving for my daughter’s third grade class, I directed the students to use their laptops to log on to a clever website (mrpicassohead.com) where users can create their own Picasso-inspired masterpieces. Before I was able to get to the site myself, nearly all of the children had logged on, jumped headfirst into the site’s interactive toolset and were creating their own artwork. By the time I stood to walk around the class to answer questions, my own daughter had captured a frame grab from the site and converted it into a customized screensaver, while another child was already e-mailing a copy of the file to his parents.
No, this is not an article about health food or ways to make your website more “earth-friendly”. It’s about using search engine optimization (SEO) effectively, to make your website more profitable. These days, there seems to be as much buzz about SEO as there is about that other global trend, “going green”. And while I’m as passionate about the earth as anyone, my goal here is to help make your business more sustainable!
