Why Blog?

One good reason that every business should have a blog is for building a catalog of recommendations. When we need to prove that our product or service has value we can show the evidence in our blog posts and their Comments. Blogs are a powerful tool to use when we need to back up our recommendation to a probable buyer. This evidence is an inexpensive and easily portable way for our salespeople to prove the value of the relationship.

Our blog posts should showcase the features and benefits of our product or service. We then encourage our current customers to discuss their experience in the Comments area of the blog post. Our salespeople then have an arsenal of recommendations to help our probable purchaser see the value of our solution.

Written Testimonials are Proof of Value

Comments such as this one on a recent post show other readers that our business – and our blogs – have value:

I have also used LinkedIn as a tool for gathering recommendations such as this one:

We can then use evidence like this to engage the probable purchaser how our solution will address that customer’s needs and, more importantly, what is driving those needs. Finding the need behind the need.

So just how do we do this? We write posts for the business blog to build a body of evidence that salespeople can use to validate our business’ reputation.

Blog Topics for Business Development

• Write about the expertise of our business
• Write about the capabilities of our employees
• Demonstrate exactly how our product works (video posts are great for this)
• Use the power of links and references by other writers to prove facts and data
• Let our customers tell their own success stories using our solutions

This is only one-half of the equation. The other half involves engaging our current customers and probable purchasers in an active community. This means writing about our market and business environment. Not specifically about our business, but about the world our business and our customers live in.

Blog Topics for Community Development

• Write about current events in the industry
• Feature interviews with innovators in the field
• Point to news articles about key players in the industry
• Write reviews of newsletters and other blogs in the industry
• Embed podcasts and videos of relevant information

Writing transparently about our place in the industry and engaging probable purchasers with our evidence will specifically address what is important to our customer. This reinforcement will increase the probability of our probable purchaser’s decision to do business with us.

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