Blog Marketing | Advantages and Disadvantages of Blog Marketing

Do you know what Digital Marketing is? Have you always wished to write your own blog? Look at what Blog Marketing is and what are the advantages and disadvantages of Blog Marketing.

Blogger.com

The word “blog” is a shortened version of web logs or weblog. A blog is nothing but journal maintained by blogger and contains message and information that is instantly published to their blog website. Blogging is marketing tactic that use blogging to get business more visibility. Blogging and blog marketing could be an extremely popular activity the quantity of on-line users making and maintaining blogs has hyperbolic dramatically over the past year. Blogging has gained lots of importance these days. Both the number of blogger and readers are increasing rapidly.

Blog marketing has become new day tool for marketers. Blog marketing is an activity that publicizes or promote a website, business, brand, idea, or service through the medium of blogs. Blog marketing includes marketing via ads placed on blogs, recommendations and reviews by blogger. Blog is long term strategy. When done properly, can bring proper result.

Blog advertising refers to ads on blogs that can be in the forms of banners, text links, video, audio clips, flash animation, and even plain text. most blog-based advertising involves payment in someway or the other to the blog owner. Owner of popular blog can capitalize on their readership numbers. One can easily integrate blog with other tools of marketing. For example, blogs are easily built into existing website. One can integrate email marketing with blogs. 

Blog marketing gives opportunity to communicate the value proposition, offerings, and company background to prospects one may not otherwise have engaged with. This will result in more people visiting the website. A review from a trusty blogger may result in significantly higher sales for the company. As people value blogger for their authenticity, as their nod for product matters. This also helps a brand increase its human element on the wider marketing strategy. trusty figures in business, common product reviewers and critics typically maintain blogs wherever they supply data regarding their experiences with some product and services. It is the authenticity that allows companies to build trust with newly discovered audience it is possible because of the help of right blogger. Businesses, however, do pay common bloggers to review their products.

Advantages of blog marketing

Low cost of marketing medium: Blog can be easily made and are low cost. There are various ways through which blogs can be made. Blogs cost much less than other tools of marketing.

Organic traffic: Blogs help marketing organization to gain organic traffic. When more leads end up on site the higher the number of potential customers that are likely to buy company’s products or services. Organic traffic acts as word of mouth for organization.

Sets authority over niche: A strong online presence and great content for blog can deliver good ranking positions based in the keyword in search results.  By actively blogging company becomes alive and get persona. If more people see company as an authority in niche, there’s a good chance that company see an increase in sales.

Integration: One can easily integrate blog with other tools of marketing. For example, blogs are easily built into existing website. One can integrate email marketing with blogs.

Creates opportunities for sharing: One of the most important function of blogging is the opportunity it creates for other to share the link to company’s blog.

Enhanced company persona: Blog marketing is one-way company can come in contact with its customers. The style, voice and content of blog lets customers get a feel for who your company is and whether they want to do business with company. Blog humanize the company. It provides opportunity to constantly interact with readers. Blog act as source of feedback for companies.

Disadvantages of blog marketing

Enforcement: Putting a policy in place is one thing but enforcing the blogging policy is a whole different thing. Monitoring a variety of blogs, comments and posts is a time-consuming, task that may not be cost-effective for the organization.

Long term result: Blogs strategy is long term one cannot expect short term profit through blogs. Creating new content and updating blog is time consuming process. It doesn’t cost much to start a blog, but it takes time to create posts and monitor content.

Difficult to maintain return on investment: It is difficult to quantify the return on investment of blog marketing The Internet is flooded with information, so getting traffic to blog takes time.

Keeping quality consistently high: Keeping the quality of the content consistently high is also a challenge for marketers. The blogger has to constantly develop writing skills. A poorly written blog may do more damage than good.

Short life term of blogs: Blogs have a short life time. Companies expect fast return from blog marketing which is not possible. Companies nowadays just make blog to show that they have blog, but they don’t update blog regularly.

Negative impact on marketing efforts: If used skillfully, the blog acts as a useful marketing tool for the organization. However, imposing stringent blogging policy on what exactly employees can talk about, or which comments the company must moderate or deleting negative and unflattering consumer opinion instead of responding to them can make the blog seem impersonal. As a result, an overly strict blogging policy can have a negative impact on marketing efforts.

Impact of Blog Marketing

The supremacy of blogs in influencing consumer purchase decisions is stronger than one might even realize. According to data from a research study conducted by Research Now, nearly nine in 10 consumers (84%) make purchases after reading about a product or service on a blog. Blogs ranked as the most influential source of information to make buying decisions among consumers between the ages of 18-34, Among consumers between the ages of 35-54, blogs ranked as the second most important source behind friends, family, and reference group.

Blog advertising (display and text) as well as sponsored posts provide excellent ways for brands to get in touch with consumers. However, companies are missing out on opportunities to get hold of useful sponsored content opportunities. Popular bloggers and smaller, niche bloggers with popular audiences receive dozens or even hundreds of blog advertising and sponsored post pitches every day. Most of these pitches are template email messages sent to many bloggers which go directly to the email trash can. When brands successfully connect with a blogger, they often provide self-promotional content that is either irrelevant to the audience or so self-serving that it would damage the blog’s reputation and audience’s trust in the blog too much to publish it.Brands that invest the time into finding the right blogs to connect with their target audiences, craft pitches that are exclusively for those individual blogs, and provide useful, meaningful content that the blog’s audience would be interested in will bring in the rewards. Blog is not dead. For brands, they’re more powerful than ever but they must be leveraged correctly.

Blog marketing also helps keep your social media existence going -- instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new content for social media, your blog can serve as that depository of content. The company can strengthen their social reach with blog content and driving more visitors to their blog via their social media channels. This is a quite symbiotic relationship.