It's been a while since I've posted on my blog, so I thought now was as good at time as ever to talk about why we are pushing blogging so hard for our customers.

A static site is of course a good marketing tool for your customers.  An informative site that gives information on your products and services can be invaluable for customers who are shopping on the web.  However, the disappointing thing about most sites is the simple lack of content available on them.  Most sites contain only the bare essentials about the products and services available from a particualr company.  Customers are looking for more though, and they're quickly becoming tired of the 90s model of every small company trying to make themselves look large.  Small businesses especially should be wary of websites that try to make themselves look larger than they are and phone systems that try to make it seem like they're a large company, by requiring you to enter two or three keys before you talk to a live person.

This harkens back to what Tom has been talking about with customer immersion on his blog.  Customers today are looking for transparency and live human beings in the companies they choose to do business with.  They are frustrated by large companies with support staff who is barely more knowledgeable than the end user.  They are looking for companies who have real people they can communicate with. Blogs create transparency that previously very hard to do on a large scale.  Customers have the option to interact with personnel at companies they do business with on their time, whether that be during business hours or when they're shopping for products for their business after hours, when the phones aren't ringing off the hook.  It's increasingly important to be there for your customers during the times when they're available, whether you're open or not.

Blogs also solve the content problem I mentioned earlier.  In a lot of business, especially small business, you're not so much
buying products as you're buying the people that provide them, and
blogging is the key sales tool that can bring customers to buying your products from you and your staff.  If your business is in any way based around selling people on your staff, then let them put their personalities out there on the web, so that people can get a feel for the people they will be buying from and interacting with prior to even picking up the phone.  Our site, simply because of our blogs, has far far more content than any of competitors.  Everybody on our staff has the option to publish things they feel relevant on our site, and any potential customer can get a feeling of both our size and the quality of our staff from our writing.  We are giving them the option to either read our marketing materials about our products and services or to read about what's going on in our business and what we're talking about with our customers, or they can read it all.  For our existing customers, they can keep in touch with us on a daily basis without picking up the phone, without us having to mail them a newsletter, just by checking our site frequently or using an RSS reader.  Blogging is about giving your customers options, and based on our success with it, I can't see any reason you wouldn't want to do the same.