Top 10 Reasons to Use a Corporate Blog

1. If the content is good, a corporate blog can drive a great deal of traffic to a website.

2. If the content is keyword dense and brand-centric, a blog can drive relevant  traffic to a website, encourage user interactions and conversions

3. Generating new, fresh content helps boost a website’s search engine rankings. Why? There are always new reasons for the search engines to crawl your site. They crawl the content and bestow your site with higher rankings.

4. Potential customers also have a reason to frequent your properties. If you can establish your site as an authority on a certain topic, consumers will turn to you for information (and hopefully business).

5. You look insanely smart and up-to-date.

6. Hosting a blog forces internal resources to focus on a website. Moderating comments, broken links and general up-keep will be attended to if company bloggers are constantly posting blogs.

7. It shows potential customers that you’re passionate about what you do–so much so that you cannot help writing about it.

8. A corporate blog lends personality to brands that sometimes don’t have an avenue to let their uniqueness shine. People relate to people, so the more character you can incorporate into a brand the better.

9. Interacting with users via a blog, social networking site or profile-based platform helps marketers understand their consumers better. This is never a bad thing.

10. It keeps up the war effort (so to speak) at home. As an active participant in the digital space, you have a better understanding of the climate. Insights derived here can be applied to other marketing avenues–online or otherwise.

What do customers want? A look at desirable brand traits.

eMarketer reported today a list of the qualities customers respect in a brand. Conducted by MTV, the survey looks at the 18-24 age group to determine if a brand is indeed king. It turns out that a label is not the almighty persuader we might think. The top 3 most important characteristics are “good quality, trustworthy, and works well.”

Here are the results,

• 74% good quality
• 55% trustworthiness
• 51% the product works well
• 46% it has a cool image
• 46% it has a good history
• 46% popularity
• 44% knowing it has been good for a long time
• 40% it has class
• 39% fits with my own image
• 33% its authentic
• 33% uniqueness
• 32% people are talking about it
• 31% its cutting edge
• 29% it fits in with other products
• 25% friends like it

What’s most important to you when making a purchase?