in Online Marketing

Five Creative Ways to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool

by Carolyn Howard Johnson

Your business can benefit greatly from using your blog to as a marketing tool.

Here are our favorite techniques for creating a successful blog:

1. To attract and keep readers, a blog must include practical information. The process of creating the blog forces retailers to focus on their strengths and the aspects of their operation that make it unique. Here’s what to blog about that your blog visitors and subscribers will love.

Blog-only bargains seem the most natural subjects for business people to talk about. After all, we know people love bargains. The trick is to keep some bargains only for those who visit your blog. If they can count on once-a-month bargains they’ll be back. And if you deliver, they will keep coming back.

Your employees: new ones, employees getting awards, employees doing community service, and more. Blogging about employees lets you indirectly brag about your store, and it is an inducement for staff members to be more loyal and creative.

Yourself. This is a topic many business people shy away from. You and the operation of your business are your best brand, the one that makes you and your blog different from others. You are the romance. You are the fun. Let people know about you, let them feel like they know you and your visitors will be back.

What is in the news is already being Googled big time. Figure out a way that your business relates to current events. For example, inclement weather is an occasion for a free-shipping-with-phone-orders-over-$25 offer. You will find dozens of other ideas in Your Blog, Your Business: A Retailer’s Guide to Garnering Customer Loyalty and Sales Online and In Store.

2. To keep people engaged with your blog, do not send them somewhere else. That means that if your blog isn’t part of your website, avoid directing them to that other site. Even if your blog is housed on your website, you want your visitors to think of your blog as an important resource. Do that with sales or bargain-of-the-week pages as posts on your blog.

This works especially well if you:

• Have a search engine as part of your blog so people can search for your bargains or events
• Use codes on sales pages to drive people to your store to make the purchase
• Interlink the bargain pages to one another; that’s a little like “would you like fries with that?” but within your own blog.
• Recycle useful pages. There is no need to invent the wheel every time you have a special. Every Christmas, advertise and promote your Christmas Bargain Page. It can become a tradition your customers will come to expect.

3. Like anything else, your blog needs to be promoted. Consider doing this:

• Everywhere in your store
• On your website
• In your advertising
• On anything you print; checks, bag stuffers, fliers, invoices, receipts, bags, gift wrap, labels, and so forth
• Do not just give the blog address. Tell people the benefits they will find there.

Involve others. Even independent business people know they are not a one-person show. Neither is your blog. Get others involved and ask them to link to your blog and talk about it—specifically ask them. They may not think to do it otherwise. So who are these people? Your…

• Vendors
• Customers
• Staff members

And, those who read your blog… even if they’re not yet customers.

Most important: your blog is marketing. Stay targeted. That does not mean you cannot talk about your poodle, Cherie. To introduce her, just think of an angle that fits the purpose of your blog. Cherie is using a new line of pet supplies you carry. Cherie—with all her charms—made a new customer of a stranger you met on the street.