A corporate blog is a blog that is attached to a corporate brand. This will normally be run in order to provide information about the company to the general public, to business partners and others but it will quite often be different from a blog that a site might use on the side to write about the niche for marketing purposes. Learn the distinction in this post. A corporate blog is a blog run by a corporation that usually sells a B2B service or product. The purpose of the blog is to write about the daily operations of that blog, to update the world with announcements and news and also a way to build more camaraderie and morale in the team.
Many businesses have blogs which they run in order to promote the site. This is the basis of content marketing and simply means offering useful content for free in order to build a long-term audience of people who will return to the site repeatedly. This however is a different asset than the corporate blog which is not always aimed at a commercial audience and that is about the business rather than an interested ‘related topic’.
Transparency
While there are many uses for corporate blogs, one of the most important is to build trust with the clients and customers and to offer transparency. In the digital age the way we do business has changed to a large degree. Many new tools and infrastructures have enabled us to provide the same products and services but in new and exciting ways that improve the customer experience and cut overheads considerably. One of the things that has brought the biggest changes of all though is the wealth of new options we now have at our disposal when it comes to communication. This now allows your business to communicate far more effectively not only with your business partners and within your organization, but also with your customers in order to keep a better relationship going between you and to give your business more personality and help establish trust.
Openness and transparency is something that's increasingly an important way to get your customers behind your business plans and to keep up with the competition. Here are some ways that communication technologies will enable you to do that.
Blogs: Having a blog is a great way to get people interested in your business and what you are doing, to release news and updates and to communicate directly with your customers and clients. This way you can write about products and services you have in development, and you can make announcements. There are countless benefits to this – allowing you to respond to media coverage, to get customer feedback and opinions on upcoming projects, and to let people in on your creative process.
Employee Blogs: IBM is well known for allowing and encouraging its employees to keep blogs. This gives your business an even more personal edge than just having a corporate blog and allows people to see what it's like for an employee to work for your business and to paint a better image of your corporate culture and principles.
Social Networking: Social networking can likewise be used in a number of ways to communicate with your customers and clients and to get them to pledge allegiance by 'liking' or 'following' your pages and profiles. This is a great way to establish a relationship with your market, but at the same time you do need to be careful with just how candid and friendly you are here – if you get too personal and if your customers get to see the internal disputes and ugly sides of your employees then this can tarnish your professional image. Be open and allow your customers to network with you, but at the same time make sure to keep it essentially professional.
Open Information: The more information you release the more you will gain the trust of the general public. Free giveaways of old software now open-source for instance is a great gesture that several software companies have used to win friends and to get people to better understand how their products and business operate. Likewise, you should release financial and legal information when requested and be open and honest with your terms of service and privacy policies. As soon as you refuse to release information you encourage people to get suspicious as to what you're 'hiding' and this sheds a bad light on your organization
Of course, this information can be given freely via the corporate blog.
More Benefits of Corporate Blogs
While transparency and trust are big issues when it comes to the benefits of a corporate blog, there are also more besides.
For instance, corporate blogs benefit from being able to craft a brand and build more of a relationship with the audience. One of the big reasons that blogs are so successful for individuals is that people feel as though they can get to know the user. This is the ‘personal brand’ and it’s what inspires trust and loyalty in the customer. This is also why social media works so well for individuals – as they can post about their day and share what they had for lunch etc. This often subtly promotes a certain lifestyle.
For a company, the same thing can be accomplished with a corporate blog. And this works particularly well for smaller start-ups that people are more likely to feel some affiliation to and affection for. For instance, you can post images of the team together working hard, images of your Christmas party, or stories about how the company overcame tough working scenarios. This way, your partners, clients and customers will feel as though they know the team more and will in term feel more inclined to want to buy from you.
Finally, corporate blogs can be great for morale – especially employee blogs. This way, people can read about the company they’re working for and really feel as though they’re part of something bigger. They can read about the factors influencing things like cut backs, budget cuts etc. and no longer have to speculate and guess.
