The blog has an important characteristic: its low cost. Setting up a blog solution is financially very rewarding. For a few hundred euros per year, you have an online platform capable of welcoming all your visitors and meeting all your expectations in terms of content distribution. The choice of this platform should be based on your internal technical resources. You can :
- use an independent solution that you manage yourself. You must install, configure and update it regularly. The advantage of this solution is that you are very free to customize and manage it. On the other hand, you are required to take care of the technical aspect, the installation and the maintenance on the servers. In this case, you can use open source solutions such as WordPress or Dot-clear. Or
- use a solution hosted by a service provider. These providers offer you an already installed solution. The service provider takes care of the management and technical maintenance, so you can devote yourself fully to the animation of your community.
There are many possible applications for the corporate blog. It will primarily depend on your activity and what you can say about it. The blog is a place for dialogue and communication; you must, therefore, orient it in such a way that you have information to convey.
You must, first of all, know if the blog you are setting up is intended to be permanent or punctual. Indeed, you can set up a very specific blog linked to an event, a product or a commercial operation in order to communicate on this well-determined operation in time. The objective of this type of blog responds to a one-time request for information.
These blogs are very often buzz marketing operation blogs, aimed at getting the most out of the event in a very short time. They have the particularity of increasing in power quickly but also of falling back very quickly into anonymity once the operation is over.
The revival of the site’s visibility on the internet goes through an operation implemented around the blog. The life of the blog is several months during which several people will have to carry out challenges that will have been proposed to the preamble by all the readers of the blog. This blog is a real hub for the product site as it promotes the brand on a daily basis on the web.
Indeed, the final objective is to define who will win the most challenges and for this, it is still the community that votes by commenting on their favorite candidate. Ultimately, Internet users who have proposed the best challenges will be rewarded with gifts and the best of the two players in the game (who are also 2 bloggers) will win a trip.
In this example of a one-time business blog, the blog is part of a buzz marketing campaign around a new product. The success of a such blog goes through the importance of relays on the internet. In one month, the blog may generate huindreds of comments, create tens of challenges and continues to develop its number of incoming links with already more than tens of relays on the web.
The company can also set up a permanent blog which will be able to meet different needs:
- new products
- new services
- promotions
- online help and FAQs
- news
- industry trends
- press relation
- crisis communication
This type of blog is spreading more and more within companies but it requires a real internal organization for the management and updating of content. One of the rules of using a blog is to post new posts regularly. Readers get into the habit of reading the blog at a certain frequency depending on the activity on it and it is absolutely necessary to maintain the rhythm of writing articles.
This data imposes rigor in setting up a blog, otherwise the success of this new tool will not be there.
Source: 7 stratégies e-marketing illustrées, within the framework of the Etoile Project, a European INTERREG 3A project financing with the support of the ERDF. License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 FR. Independent translation and adaptation by Nicolae Sfetcu
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