Blogs and forums for marketing your business
December 15, 2005Building a community for marketing
One of the key marketing tools I often recommend to clients is to try and build a community to market to.
The two main methods of doing this are blogs and forums, and both allow for different elements of community development.
Why is this important?
Well, for a start, both can provide a channel of direct communication between the company and the customer.
Secondly, it can create a direct community to market to.
Not everyone in the community may be a customer at first, but with proper development, you can create new customers from your community development.
Blogs as community building tools
Blogs are simply online journals. Some people use them as personal journals, others as independent media publishing platforms, and others still for marketing purposes. We’ll deal with the latter here.
Company blogs?
Blogs are good for marketing purposes, because they provide a more direct communications channel with customers and potential customers.
However, a company blog with an impersonal voice is usually going to be a very limited channel for community building – it offers more direct benefits for the company as a Public Relations tool.
A company blog can give a company a platform demonstrate its importance, provide up-to-date news and product information, and generally sell the value of the company and its services to any passing reader.
Employee blogs
To really generate a sense of community, a blog really needs to offer something to its readers that gives them a reason to participate. A key strategy here is personalisation of the blogger – the person writing the blog.
This means a person with a face, with a personal voice, with something to say that has a meaning that readers can respond to.
Of course, the easiest way to do this is to have your employees as bloggers.
The obvious pitfall is that employees may not always say things about a company that the company wants it to say
The way to get around this is to firstly ensure that your employees are happy people.
Secondly, make sure your senior staff are out there blogging and getting key attention.
Limitations of blogs
The important limit to blogs is that it’s effectively a one-voice medium – meaning that the blogger themselves needs to have an important enough voice to be read in the first place.
As with all things website related, this means building up a reputation over time as someone with something to say.
However, a lot of bloggers suffer “bloghaustion” – they drop out from blogging because they simply lose the impetus to blog and keep the site updated.
Additionally, if there are many people covering a similar subject area, it can be very hard to get your voice noticed, even over time.
In that regard, you really need to establish what the aims of the blog are, and ensure you can keep straight with those aims.
Often a blog will only be able to cater to a narrow but targeted audience - to increase your reach, you can build a forum.
Forums for marketing
Forums are a very underrated tool for marketing.
For a start, forums are a genuine community building tool – it’s not a voice for a single person, but a whole community.
Not only will a community eventually develop the momentum for your forum for you, the content they generate is a good way to capture search traffic for other people looking for information on related subjects.
Mind you, forums can go off-topic, and forums will not always attract the most targeted traffic – but even if someone simply visits the forum, you can expose them to your brand.
Forums for advertising
When you build a company, you build a brand. You can expose a wider number of people to that brand via the forum traffic you generate.
Most obviously, you can offer your products and/or services to that community and passing traffic with properly placed advertising.
The balancing act here is that people will only accept a certain level of advertising before they’ll find it invasive, and stop visiting.
However, get the balance right, and you don’t simply engage a willing community to advertise to, but you also engage all passing traffic, whether from search engines or referral links.
Communities require work
The downside to forums is that they demand investment of a tremendous amount of time simply to develop momentum.
The key strategy is to ensure that you can keep up your own personal momentum, and encourage participation, until such point as the forum reaches “critical mass” – which is when the forums have enough momentum to continue without your direct intervention.
Another issue with forums is that you need to ensure you have good interpersonal skills to handle the social environment that is the forum community. Used badly, and it can turn into a PR nightmare as contested decisions rip your hard-built up community to shreds, and invalidate your work.
Community building references
For more information on community building online, here are some useful references: