By Louise Waern
For a long time monthly newsletters have been a crucial part of the digital marketing mix. There are more powerful ways to get your message to your target groups. Blogging is one of them!
Blog content is indexed by Google, which means it is searchable for a wider audience. The content of a newsletter is not searchable online.
Most of the time a newsletter is sent to the target group once or twice a month. A blog can be updated much more frequently. It is far easier for the marketing department to post a single post on one subject than to gather a whole lot of different types of content in one long newsletter. In blogs, the reader can choose how often he/she would like to receive information.
Newsletters are sent to a defined group—a defined number of email addresses. A blog post is sent to everyone who has subscribed to the blog, but it also enables the content to be shared offsite (to other social media platforms). In this way you are much more likely to attract new potential leads with blog content than with content packaged in a newsletter.
The blog makes it possible for your company to communicate with the readers via the comment functionality. Thanks to this you can start building a relationship with the people that are reading your blog and start a dialogue instead of just a monologue.
Your target group consist of different personas, all with different needs. They search for different type of knowledge and answers to questions related to their everyday work life. To get them to choose you, follow you and like you; you need to create your content with them in mind. A newsletter is a static communications unit with different bits and pieces of content. This unit is thrown at everyone, no matter if they are interested in your company development or your area of expertise. You should stop doing that and instead give your target audiences the possibility to get what they want rather than what you as a company want them to get. Create different blogs for different types of content, for example; one blog for knowledge based content and another one for more traditional ‘news and updates’.
It is tricky to find out who read what in a newsletter full of various types of content. A blog post can easily be measured and analysed. Who was it read by? When and for how long? Which blog posts gets the most views? This will give you an idea of what your prospects are interested in and what type of content you should present to your segments later.
Yet, as always, it is not all black and white—it is still great to send emails to certain segments of your target groups from time to time, depending on the message and goal. For example if you have a specific offer that could interest a specific segment, or if you have an event that you would like to inform about.
Here you can find some more stats on positive effects of business blogging.
And if you need help getting started with blogging—read our blog post about how to get started.
Contact Zooma to learn more about blogging!