The marketing environment is currently in a transition phase in which more and more marketing spending is shifting away from traditional media like print and television and more toward online channels. A widely circulated report by Outsell projected that spending online marketing would outpace print methods in 2010, which would be the first time this has ever happened. Companies are starting to realize that people are spending more time online, browsing sites, interacting on social networks, and reading blogs.
However, it is not easy to break a habit, and many marketing executives are still loyal to the old way of marketing that probably helped them get to where they are today. They may think that traditional marketing methods have been successful for all these years so why should they change. This resistance can be a challenge that you may face as you try to get your boss or client to understand the tremendous value that blogging can create. So I have put together some ideas for selling the marketing value of a blog to non-believers.
Provide examples of blogging success stories
There are numerous business blogs that have become tremendous assets for companies and have generated significant revenue. According to the book Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, Bill Marriott’s blog has earned more than $5 million for Marriott from people who clicked through to the reservation page after viewing his blog. Company blogs like Nuts About Southwest and the Zappos blog attract thousands of readers who seek out information about these companies. On a local scale, you can probably find a local business who is crushing it with their blog and as a result are outranking all their competitors in Google for the top industry keywords.
Present statistics that support logical arguments
Since many managers are left-brain thinkers who are highly analytical and numbers driven, providing numbers that support your cause can help. Statistics alone may not be very meaningful, so seek out statistics that support a logical conclusion like that blogs tend to increase overall traffic to a company website. A blog adds more pages to a website, which tends to translate into more potential pages that appear in Google search results which leads to more traffic to the site. A stat that will support this logic is that according to a Hubspot survey the average company that blogs has 55% more visitors and 434% more indexed pages.
Ask for a trial run and measure the results
Asking for a trial run may buy you some time to start building traction for your blog. This can be an easier sell that asking for resources for a never ending project. Once you show that the blog is providing positive value for customers and attracting organic traffic from search engines for important keywords, you should be able to extend the project.
Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness
While this may not always be the best approach, you can be like Wendy Harman, the social media manager at American Red Cross. According to the book Open Leadership by Charlene Li, Harman could not get approval to start a blog when she first arrived at American Red Cross. However, she knew that if the senior people could just see the effect they would like it so she used her personal credit card to buy a domain name and started blogging. Fortunately management saw positive results and approved her continued efforts without hesitation.
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