Blogs and Automotive High Performance Web Sites
Automotive high performance marketers, why aren’t you using blogs to get closer to your customers? Granted, blogs require a lot of maintenance to make them work right. But based on recent research, I think they’re worth it.
I’ve looked at several high performance automotive aftermarket sites, both manufacturing and retailing, but, of the ones I’ve checked, none offered a blog for its customers. Could it be that no one in your organization writes well enough to be responsible for the blog and its contents?
Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to be John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps corporate blogs of Fortune 500 companies might require someone with acute writing skills, but, in general, most blogs don’t. In fact, as most of us know by now, many blogs are merely stream-of-consciousness writing anyway. So, all anyone really needs is a working knowledge of the English language and its basic punctuation rules. Find a style manual you like and follow its instructions if you have to.
Regardless of whether or not the writing is stellar, blogs can be responsible for gaining new customers. In a 2007-08 study, MarketingSherpa found that the majority of corporate bloggers in their survey responded positively when asked if their organizations had seen an increase in media attention or Web site traffic. MarketingSherpa’s conclusion was that “the primary impact of good blogging is felt in the cross-linking and referencing that takes place, raising a company’s profile.” What’s a raised profile worth to your company?
For a blog to be effective, a company needs to post entries at least two to four times per week, so a time commitment is involved. Setting up your blog is simple, and the income-producing potential it offers offsets the time expenditure.
