Seth Godin has a great line about websites being for facts and figures and business blogs being for stories. The question I run into all the time is "Why do I want to write stories"
To that I can now turn to the above graph and a great new joint study from Opinion Research and Adfusion. The milestone finding from this report is that people prefer, and are highly engaged with, stories that include product information more than any other online tactic. We talk a lot about the failure of advertising here in this blog, 2009 is bringing a huge body of evidence that supports what we all knew to be true: You can't interrupt your way to marketing success...you can only engage your way to success.
This gives us tremendous support for the core ideas behind why business blogging is your greatest customer acquisition strategy.
First thing is that search is the key tactic that people use when they have a problem they are trying to solve. Search is about intent...there is never going to be a better opportunity for marketers than when a prospect actually articulates a problem that you can solve with your product or service. Corporate Blogging is first and foremost an organic search tactic.
After search, the goal is engagement. What this study articulates so completely is that prospects prefer to engage with stories above all other forms of online advertising. Widespread employee blogging, as well as soliciting blog content from your existing customers gives you a virtually unlimited palate to tell lots and lots of great stories about what you do, how you do it, how it makes the lives of your customers better. These stories build engagement and it's that engagement that leads to conversions
To that I can now turn to the above graph and a great new joint study from Opinion Research and Adfusion. The milestone finding from this report is that people prefer, and are highly engaged with, stories that include product information more than any other online tactic. We talk a lot about the failure of advertising here in this blog, 2009 is bringing a huge body of evidence that supports what we all knew to be true: You can't interrupt your way to marketing success...you can only engage your way to success.
This gives us tremendous support for the core ideas behind why business blogging is your greatest customer acquisition strategy.
First thing is that search is the key tactic that people use when they have a problem they are trying to solve. Search is about intent...there is never going to be a better opportunity for marketers than when a prospect actually articulates a problem that you can solve with your product or service. Corporate Blogging is first and foremost an organic search tactic.
After search, the goal is engagement. What this study articulates so completely is that prospects prefer to engage with stories above all other forms of online advertising. Widespread employee blogging, as well as soliciting blog content from your existing customers gives you a virtually unlimited palate to tell lots and lots of great stories about what you do, how you do it, how it makes the lives of your customers better. These stories build engagement and it's that engagement that leads to conversions
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