A post by Elisa Camahort over at the Worker Bees Blog: Is your blog your office? Or a quantifiable marketing tool? reminded me of some conversations I had a few weeks ago (and have blogged here more than once) about the role of the blog in the marketing plan. Should you do a blog for brand awareness? Or lead generation? Or crisis communications? Or …..??
Elisa makes some excellent points in her post, not the least of which is:
"And as business people it is incumbent upon us to think about our expectations before we implement something."
That for me is the key. Blogs can serve many purposes in a business, internally and externally. But, as with any tool we choose to use in our business, we must be certain to set the proper expectations AND develop/use the tool properly to meet those expectations.
A weblog created to generate leads should be very different than one designed for brand awareness. Sure, your brand awareness blog will likely generate some leads for your business, but if you have high expectations of lots of inquiries resulting from your blog, you had better be posting content and information that drives your prospect to respond.
Just like with any other marketing tool. If you forget the call to action, whether it is a direct mail piece or a weblog entry, the phone is not likely to ring.
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