In this series of articles, we’re examining how to determine if blogging is right for your business. In the last article in this series, we looked at what kind of business you’re in so that you could help determine if blogging about your business would be a good idea.
In this article, we suggest you examine your current strategies regarding marketing.
Why? Because certain kinds of approaches to marketing make a better fit for the kind of blogging that allows you to sell enough online to pay your bills and maybe put some extra in the bank.
How do you view marketing? With contempt? As something for “experts” only? Are print ads all you think of when you think of marketing? If you’re an artisan, organic farmer, or in some other form of sustainable or Craft endeavor, you may very well view marketing with disdain. Many people do. After all, the majority of mainstream marketing “messages” attempt to create desire for the very things many of us see as societal problems: misogynistic, hyper-idealized material gluttony. Much of what passes for marketing is deceitful or sends a message we disagree with.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Marketing is anything you do facilitate the continued success of your endeavor. Because one of the most important things you can do in this area is provide excellent customer service and establish close, warm relationships with your best customers, this falls under marketing, and is distinct from advertising. Anything you do to keep your endeavor visible to potential customers is also marketing, and this may include advertising.
Blogs serve both of these needs. Blogs connect you with your customers and potential customers unlike any other marketing method. And it has one very important benefit: it is a direct, authentic extension of you and the people in your company. Blogs are meant to convey the personality of the blogger with conversational immediacy. Traditional public relations is the opposite of this. Public relations is what happens when a company wants its customers to believe what it wants them to believe, often with little regard for truth. Tobacco companies are the ultimate example of this. When a government does this, we call it propaganda. People who are of an ecologically sustainable mindset detest this form of marketing, and rightly so. They crave authenticity. They want to connect with real people; they don’t want to be deceptively fed a “message”. What could be better than a blog?
Often, artisans and farmers and the like have very strong opinions about their fields (pun fully intended!). Their customers often hold to the same opinions. You may never have thought that marketing was for you, but what I’m trying to convince you of, here, is that you need to do the right kind of marketing. Authentic, personable communications between you and your customers is marketing, but it’s much more. It’s the market itself, because markets are conversations. People don’t want to hear any more marketing messages, they want experiences and stories. One of the reasons why organic food and fair trade are experiencing such massive growth rates is because people love the stories behind them. When you’re selling these kinds of goods, you’re telling those stories too.
Or at least, you should be!
Well, I guess this turned into a rant on why you should have a blog. But I believe that so strongly, I guess it’s no surprise that I brought it back to that without even trying.
What I’m really trying to say is that if you’re not into marketing, you shouldn’t be in business. And if you’re not into the kind of marketing I’m talking about (as are some of the best minds in business), then your business will never amount to much of anything. Which means you shouldn’t be in business. Go home.
