5 Kickass Benefits of Having a Business Blog in Kenya

Blogging is an important and relevant part of social media marketing. While the height of blogging popularity peaked in the 90s and early 2000s as a form for activists to vent out, today businesses and corporations have discovered just how much running a professional blog could alter their profit margins.

More importantly however, blogs have become the number one channel for business that use content marketing to reach out to new leads and keep the existing leads engaged.

Companies use blogs to keep their customers informed about major and minor changes taking place in their industry as well as post informative content. Effective use of blog content creates customers loyalty and builds your brand value.

The Benefits of Having a Business Blog in Kenya

Business entrepreneurs who are effectively using blogs for content marketing report four main benefits. Note that the benefits far outweigh what these four points.

• Increased traffic to their money blogs and websites through social sharing and search engine visibility.
• Increases SEO, leading to increased visibility of their brands
• Makes brands appear stronger and authoritative
• and develop better customer relationships.

Keeping a regularly updated blog will give your small business the opportunity to create relevant connections with your leads. As people find your blog posts and share them, traffic to your money site builds up. Needless to say, some of this traffic is nurtured and qualified, leading to increased sales and profit for the your business business.

Blog posts that are well written and informative have a way of weaning and preparing the lead for the final sale. They do this by building the lead’s trust in the brand and eventually winning their loyalty. Again, by writing strictly non-promotional content on your blogs, you give your customers a chance to see and experiencing the human side of the company, allowing them to connect with the brand and remain loyal to it.

How to Make Your Kenyan Business Blog Successful

Achieving the non-promotional level of blogging explained above is not a mean feat. Successful blogging incorporates all of these things:

• Combines self-expression and subtle promotion
• Becomes a networking tool
• Supplies a platform for raising awareness about social issues
• Gives businesses a side source of income
• Advertising is made easier for businesses with a blog
• Requires creative thinking and writing
• Combines promotion, marketing, social networking, and social skills
• Needs web design, photography, and other media to be successful
• Takes time, money, and education to start it and maintain it
• Writers with discipline, creativity, courage, goals, time management, and organizational skills

Another often ignored benefit of running an active business blog is the fact that blogs are an accessory to the efforts you put into social media marketing. Your Kenyan blogs can feature every social media platform the business uses. By including social media sharing buttons with your blog posts, you actually manage to kill two birds with one stone.

Unlike social media sites, blogs allow businesses to give customers a full sense of who they are without the limitations that the social media sites present. Blogs do not limit businesses to a certain number of characters and do not require picture-only posts. The text focus gives businesses the chance to be human to their customers.

While blogging is not as popular as it used to be, it is still going to become a staple for the future of business. This is because it combines social skills, accessibility, textual content, user-friendly knowledge, and a standard for internet content.

Here is a nutshell of the advantages that blogging offers:

• Social. Blogging is posting quality content to the internet which often gets shared on social media sites. There is also the ability to comment and for the blogger to respond to comments. This makes it the ultimate social networking tool.
• Accessible. Blogging does not require any formal writing experience, just a great knowledge of the niche the blog belongs to.
• Text. Focus is beginning to shift away from media-only and back to a base of text content. Blogs are mostly text with the ability to insert images and videos. This allows blogs to incorporate all trends of marketing.
• User-friendly. There are many great blogging platforms that make content very easy to customize, post, and share.
• Standard. Blogging is a staple that has been around for two decades. It will continue to be a staple and soon will become standard for any job seekers and all college students to maintain. 

5 Important Metrics to Use For Youtube Video Marketing

Are you using YouTube to promote your business and keep your audience up-to-date with crucial information related to your brand? According to Content Institute, more than 70% of B2Bs are using YouTube as their choice content marketing channel.

A lot has been said about content being king and gone are the days when the audience was a passive recipient of all advertising hogwash that a product or brand deemed fit to slap into their ears and eyes. Research has shown that more and more consumers are first seeking information before committing their shillings to a product. As a business marketer, you therefore need to be talking to your audience as opposed to bombarding them with splashy and pricey PPC ads.

Receptive business entrepreneurs have already adapted to this demand and have turned from merely selling ads to creative content marketing. This metamorphosis has seen the advent of several channels through which businesses talk to their audience including common social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, company blogs and video distribution channels such as Youtube and Vimeo. YouTube has evolved as one of the commonest content marketing channels.

For most of the brands and companies, correctly measuring the analytics for their YouTube videos however remains a nightmare. If you have been one of the content marketers who’ve been feeling like they are caught in a quagmire, this article will give you just the right tips for measuring your YouTube video and channel analytics.

[h2a] Getting Started With YouTube Video Marketing [/h2a]

Every serious content marketer understands that Measuring and interpreting content marketing analytics correctly is essential to their content marketing campaigns. Understanding who is accessing your content and how best you can tailor the content to meet your audience demands, tastes and preference is imperative if you are going to emerge victorious in the content marketing arena.

Launching a channel or even a single video into YouTube and attracting viewership into it will demand your time, a lot of human effort and resources, probably a larger monetary budget, and not forgetting great and groundbreaking content to share. Anyone else who tells you there is an easier way of doing this is in all essence a liar or a content marketing ignoramus.

After you have attracted your first few viewers, an unending battle to convert them into subscribers and repeat viewers ensues. Here, you will need a few content marketing tactics to ensure that you retain your old viewers and consistently attract new ones. There is however no easy way of doing this without understanding what is converting and what is not converting.

The YouTube Analytics Tool is a free tool that provides content marketers with precise metrics of how many views their videos have received, where most traffic came from, the demographics of their audience and a ton of other important metrics.

Using the data harvested from YouTube Analytics Tool, you can easily tailor your video marketing strategies to resonate more with your audience demographics. Here are a few metrics that can prove very fruitful in your video content marketing strategies.

[h2a] Tips For Making The Best Out of The YouTube Anaytics Tool [/h2a]

• Total Number of Views

This is probably the most important metric when it comes to determining the overall success of your YouTube videos. Important questions to ask yourself is whether the total views are increasing or decreasing over time. By comparing the video views of your uploaded videos, you can easily understand what topics in your content marketing campaign resonates more with your audience. You can then use the resultant information to advance content creation strategies that resonate with your audience.

The YouTube Analytics tool provides this metric below every video. [image highlighting this]

• Using the YouTube Analytics Video Ratings

If the total number of views were….then the YouTube video ratings are the…. The video ratings provide direct feedback of what your viewers think about your particular video. The level of ratings is available below every YouTube video as thumbs indicating likes and dislikes. Clicking on any one of them reveals more insights about the number of people who liked your video, favorite it, embedded it or shared it on social networks.

•      Tracking Audience Engagement

Audience engagement should be a central part of measuring the success of your Youtube video marketing campaigns. The number of likes and dislikes on your video is also used to measure audience engagement. The other ways of measuring audience engagement is by determining the number of shares and comments that have been left on your particular video, how many embeds have been made and how many people have favorite your videos.

Additionally, the number of subscribers on your channel will tell you how engaging your video content is. The higher the number of subscribers, the higher the engagement. A lowly subscription will probably mean that you have to change your video marketing tactics.

All these metrics are available in the YouTube Analytics Tool.

• Tracking Traffic Sources

Knowing where the traffic for your videos hailed from will help you to efficiently maximize the use of the traffic source channels while promoting your videos. For instance, if you realize that most of your video views are coming from YouTube research/search, you may want to optimize all your YouTube videos to be easily found and indexed by search engines.

You can also use this metric to determine which of your video promotional method is not converting. If for example you find that the traffic from social media channels was inadequate, this will serve as a pointer that there is something terribly wrong with your social media marketing campaigns.

•    Monitoring the Video Retention

The audience retention metric on the YouTube Analytics tool determines the amount of length your audience stays on a particular video. If you have a lot of audience coming to your channel but watching your videos for less than enough length, this indicates a disconnect in your video presentation skills. You need to repackage your Youtube video marketing content to contain more punch. If on the other hand, your audience breaks off at the later part of a video, you can try to find out what turned them off at that juncture.

 

 

 

Five Reasons Why You Should Not Be Advertising Your Business

Yes, I just warned you to not advertise your business. Stash the dollars you were planning to use on Pay Per Click advertising somewhere else. Hire a freelance blogger with the amount or grab yourself a few cups of cappuccino and sit next to your computer writing blog posts till your fingers itch and they develop blisters and you cannot write anymore because if you have neglected content marketing, there is no way your extensive advertising budget is going to give you durable results.

What I am going to show you will make you feel like an idiot who’s been on the receiving end of advertising scams.

The metrics are overturned and the clever merchants are no longer spending their hard earned profits running banner ads, Pay per click ads or print ads! The realization that content is king has transformed the way businesses promote their content. We are seeing a trend where businesses are more and more sold to producing content for their blogs and social media accounts.

The big question lies with us as Kenyan small business owners; are we doing all that is there to do to make sure that blogs are the new imperial marketing king?

If, as a Kenyan business owner, you are not yet sold to the idea of producing content for your blog, here are five top reasons to make you change your mind:

1. Search      engines fall in love with blogs

No. That’s not frankly true. Search engines adore regularly updated blogs. Let me give you a hypothetical instance, I used to run a blog which I kept regularly updated and every time I would search for a keyword that I had used in my blog, I would find my blog posts among the top search engine result pages(SERPs). This went on until I decided that the blog had run its course and it was time to stop pampering it with content. Guess what happened when I revisited my keywords a few months later. I was nowhere in the SERPs! During this time that I did not update my blog, my pageviews had dropped from a glorious 2k per day to slightly over 60 pageviews!

What this means to you as a Kenyan businessperson is that you have to keep your blogs up-to-date with relevant information if you want to reap the juicy fruits of content marketing.

2. Users      will love your content

This should read more like “your audience will share your blog posts in social media without coercing them to do it.” if you have taken time to make sure that the content on your blog is stellar, unique and informational, there is no reason why the audience on your blog won’t love to share it with their friends and relatives in the social media.

3. That      Permalink on your blog is reason to hire a blogger

I didn’t want this to sound like my grade school paper otherwise I would have said it point blank. Blog posts are more durable than any form of ads. Think of a print ad for example, for how long will it run before it starts browning. Think of a PPC ad unit, will anyone bookmark it for later reference? No sir, the moment they navigate from it, that is it. Kwaheri. Bye bye. Blog posts on the other hand come with what we call a permalink-users can bookmark them. You can have cookies on your site….

4. Blogs      Educate your Leads

Today’s consumer cannot be compared with yesterday’s. Yesterday’s consumer was relegated to passively absorbing promotional messages from old skul media. Today’s consumer is more interested in mining information first. The first shop that they hit before they chuck out their credit cards to purchase your service and commodities is Google.

Blogs will let you to educate your leads and prep them for the sale. Quality and informative content that is not salesy will cultivate customer loyalty.

5. you have      it, loyalty

What would keep a client coming back into your website time and again? Is it the display of your products and services? I thought so too. It is stellar content on your blog that creates engagement with your leads. Stellar content prompts your audience to leave comments on your blog….comments are good for blogs

I can think of a thousand other reasons why you should stash those ads you are using in PPC advertising. The above are just examples. Blogging is ultimately the most cost-effective and effective promotional tool that you have for your business.