Should Your Business Have a Blog?

Wedding vendors often tell me that they have been advised by "a marketing expert" to set up a blog (or a MySpace page, or a FaceBook entry, or some other technology du jour). They're intrigued and excited by the idea of "free marketing," but also nervous: they don't know how they will fit managing a blog into their already overpacked agenda, and aren't completely convinced that doing so is a good use of their time. I think they're wise to be cautious!

For a minority of wedding vendors, adding a blog can be a useful, cost-effective marketing tool. For many others, though, adding a blog may be a misuse of precious time and energy.

How do you decide whether you're in the first group? Here are some things I believe you should consider before diving in:

1) Do you have the needed skills?

Remember that anything you do online that is connected to your business represents your business. If you enjoy writing and editing -- and are good at it -- a blog might be a good investment of your time. However, if you don't have the skills to create a high-quality blog that represents your business as professionally as any other marketing materials you'd provide to prospects, you probably shouldn't attempt it.

2) Do you have something of value to say?

Today's internet users perceive blogs as a primary source of entertainment and information, and that affects their expectations about what a blog should be -- and should not be. People expect more from a blog than just a marketing message about your company. A marketing pitch masquerading as useful information or entertainment probably won't fool enough people to help your business, and could even alienate the very people you're hoping to attract.

Assuming you do have expert insights and tips that would be valued by potential readers, you should also consider whether you want to share them. Producing a blog that has enough information value to make it worth reading might mean giving away expertise you should be saving for in-person discussions with prospects and clients.

3) Do you have the time and energy and quantity of information to keep the blog updated?

A defining characteristic of blogs is that they have a perceived shelf life, because entries are posted with a date. Can you post quality information frequently enough to keep your blog fresh?

This is more important than you might think. Information that is very old is taken less seriously, as is a blog that is updated only rarely. A visitor to your blog might even think your company is out of business if your last blog entry is very dated.

4) Can you benefit from an ongoing relationship with customers?

One of the best things about blogging is that it allows you to interact repeatedly over time with your customers and prospects, who can subscribe to blogs via RSS feeds and email updates. This is why a current, well-written blog can work marketing magic for companies like gourmet food and wine merchants, toy vendors, technology companies, high fashion retailers, booksellers, etc. Customers in these categories can be motivated to try something new in response to good information about the things they like to buy.

For wedding vendors, though, most purchases are one-shot deals. That means that the investment you make in attracting a readership can't ever pay off more than once. (Once a bride has booked her DJ or bought her wedding gown, she's unlikely to value information on those services ever again -- or at least not very soon.) And that may mean that return on investment of time and knowledge to create a blog may not justify the cost.

One notable exception to this is wedding photography. With most married couples planning to have children, photographers who offer family portraits, maternity, seniors, etc. have an incentive to create a recurring relationship with their wedding prospects and customers. (But, of course, a blog is not the only way to do so! Depending on your skills, interests and resources, other approaches like direct mail and email might make more sense.)

5) Do you have the knowledge and resources to develop traffic for a blog?

While creating and maintaining a blog is a fair bit of work, it's just part of the process. Once you've got a blog, you've got to make sure it's seen.

Ensuring your blog is accessed by the prospects you're hoping to reach is no simple task. It requires optimizing your blog's content for search engines, submitting your blog's address to relevant directories, accumulating links -- all the same things that it takes to drive traffic to any web site. Ultimately, you might find you can't reach a significant number of your prospects with your blog without paying to advertise it on Google and elsewhere -- undermining the idea of "free" marketing. And, even if you don't buy advertising for your blog, you will still need to invest significant time and energy into optimizing it (and may find you need to hire expert help for that).

Perhaps most important, if you try to develop traffic for your blog without outside help or advertising, you will likely need to be very, very patient: purely organic web traffic is very difficult to attract. It can take as long as six months to a year to get indexed and ranked by the major search engines, and your pages will likely move to the top of search results very slowly (if at all). If you choose to do a blog, it may ultimately become a cost-effective marketing tool for your business -- but, it's important to remember that it may take quite some time to see results.

6) Is your main web site as good as it needs to be?

First things first. The end result of any successful marketing you do -- print ads, internet ads, direct mail, or a blog -- is to drive more traffic to your web site. If your web site is not up to snuff, there's not much point in investing time and resources generating more interest in it.

One possible exception: if you don't yet have a web site, blogging software can be a way to help you get started with a web presence. Still, question 1 still applies: if you can't create something yourself that represents your business in its best possible light, put the resources you have into professional help instead.