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. 

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How to Achieve Overnight Brand Awareness for Your B2B Using LinkedIn

On a recent B2B marketing workshop that we organized in Mombasa, Kenya, an entrepreneur asked me to give a genuine comparison between LinkedIn and Facebook as instruments of driving brand awareness.

 Which one did I think was better of the two, he asked.

“LinkedIn is the better social media marketing platform to use for creating B2B brand awareness and content marketing strategies. Not only is it geared toward all businesses and professionals, but also provides the vital marketing strategy that has been used from time immemorial, networking.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook marketing, but instead of talking about the latest celebrity gone crazy, the content in LinkedIn discusses the dangerous importance society places on celebrity idols. LinkedIn gives brands and businesses more marketing and networking opportunities than any other social media outlets.

I would honestly advice any online entrepreneur who is considering to implement a B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy, to give LinkedIn brand awareness tools first priority.” That was my answer in so many words.

3 Features Behind the Awesome LinkedIn Brand Awareness Creation Strategies

 

There are 3 main features on LinkedIn that will help you build brand awareness and play a crucial role with your content marketing strategies. These include company pages, profiles, and groups.

Building a Company Page On LinkedIN

Starting a company page on LinkedIn is the best way to get your brand out on the market. A company page allows you to share job opportunities about your company and talk about the behind the scenes operations going on. Talking about your company on the page will allow other businesses to see what goes on behind the B2C marketing and trust your brand more. It also gives potential employees interest and knowledge about your company.

Your LinkedIn Company Page is the perfect place to post self-centered information on the company, such as product releases and press releases, which should not be on your content marketing company blog. Users can follow your page to get updates on the company, and any employees on the website will automatically follow the content.

Use LinkedIn Employee Profiles to create more brand awareness and trust

Your company employees should be on LinkedIn but this alone will not ensure success with your B2B marketing. Encourage them to make their pages professional in a way that positively reflects the company.

The employees are one of the most important factors in the image of a brand and they will help raise awareness of it thanks to the vast networking capabilities of the website. Make sure all employees are linked to the company page correctly so the correct name and logo appear on their profile.

search and join LinkedIn Groups related to your product niche

Groups is a section of LinkedIn that acts like a discussion forum on the internet. Yet groups are not informal and full of attacks like internet forums are. Instead, they are similar to breakout session at a conference.

Unfortunately, company pages cannot join LinkedIn Groups. This however does not mean you should not tap into this awesome marketing feature. If you are serious about using LinkedIn to create brand awareness, owners and managers need to set up their own profile in order to participate in LinkedIn Groups.

Once you have a personal profile set up, find groups that relate to your business. For example, if you sell clothes on a retail website, join groups about retail marketing or eCommerce schemes. There will be hundreds of groups to choose from, so join groups with more members and posts each month.

By using the above 3 features, you can rest assured that your brand is causing ripples in all the right places and that you are using LinkedIn effectively to create your B2B brand awareness.

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 Take Away Tips

• When you are creating your company page, LinkedIn will use your company name in the URL. If your company name is long, it is harder to link to your page. Abbreviate your company name at first in order to make a manageable URL, then edit your company name after initial set up.
• Add aesthetic graphics to your company page, including your logo and a great cover image that accurately represents your business.
• Don’t worry about crafting the perfect description of the company. The About section will be pushed to the bottom of the page once you start adding content.
• When in groups, follow users who positively contribute to the discussion and like their posts. This is a great way to increase brand awareness.
• Do not post too often in groups at first. Instead, participate in discussion without talking about yourself twice a week for about a month. Once you have established yourself on groups, start your own discussion and share relevant links or your company’s blog posts.
• Invite customers to join a group you participate in if it is relevant to them.
• Create your own group once you have many customers and partners on LinkedIn. Make sure you have enough connections to make the group active in discussion, or else it looks bad for your brand. Hire a community manager to keep the discussion moving long term.