One of the best ways to drive up business is with strong customer engagement. This applies almost universally, across industries and sales methods.

It applies from physical stores and ecommerce, to physical products and digital goods, and to HVAC wholesalers and clothing outlets. The idea is that any business which keeps customers in communication, through their site or retail stores, is going to get repeat orders from those customers.

Get customers through the door

The challenge of course is getting customers to continually return to a website or place of business.

To succeed with getting customers back to a store, many businesses make use of good location, helpful sales people, opportunities for window shopping, and product demos. This makes these stores an informative resource and an entertaining experience.

Consider just about any game shop. There are walls covered with new and used games and at least three demo stands to cover the current game console generation. So why go to the effort of a custom built display just to play a fifteen minute demo? Well, it entertains customers. It entices them to come into the store to kill time. Once someone is through the door, there's a good chance something will catch their eye.

The same logic is deviously present in a wide variety of stores. Most places with clothes will have mirrors and fitting rooms. Many pet stores have open areas dedicated just to handling dogs on display. Computer and technology stores will have computers, TVs, and phones setup to demo and try out. It makes customers that much more likely to come into the store.

Ecommerce sites don't quite have these options. There's no easy way to get someone on an ecommerce site for entertainment. People generally don't go on Amazon to kill time when they're surrounded by so many other entertaining alternatives. This is where the blog comes in.

If your customers are plumbers, they'll read industry plumbing magazines and an informative plumbing blog. If your customers are gamers, they'll read gaming articles. This informs, entertains, and kills time. To the customer, it's free. To the blog owner, it's free site views and puts their name in the customer's mind.

Consider a site like videocopilot.net. This site makes addons and stock resources for video editors. That could be a very bland store that only sees traffic from editors already planning to buy something and get back to work like some wholesale asset site.

Instead, the team at Videocopilot offers not only their products, but free assets and tutorials. Their site has a purpose besides just being a store. Editors visit the site to learn how to make certain effects and get some free stuff. It gets them in the 'door' and creates positive feelings about the company.

Offer useful content

The tutorials help drive users to Videocopilot, their products get awesome reviews after viewers see them in the tutorials, and word of mouth makes the company explode in popularity.

Other sites in the production industry apply the same approach. Sites like Blenderguru.com, CGCookie.com, and even B&H Photography have an online content presence to get their customers' attention.

There are hundreds of other companies with the same strategy in other industries. In the HVAC industry, sites like supplyhouse.com have a blog, an active youtube channel, and even go so far as to have a section of their site dedicated to providing other helpful information.

In the automotive industry, companies like Eastwood and RevZilla have whole video series about their products and how to use them.

And blogs aren't even restricted to technical endeavors. Shopify, National Geographic, UPS, and many others all operate blogs to reach their customers. That's everything from how to design an online store, how to run an online store, how to ship things, and the state of the shipping industry all the way to blogs about wildlife, the world, and the documentaries that go along with it.

Companies from little town stores straight up to multinationals have taken advantage of good content.

Drawbacks and considerations of having a blog

There are however, some significant challenges to running a successful blog. It's one thing to throw some articles on a company website, it's another to make those articles a successful marketing initiative.

The articles need to be relevant, planned, and well written. The site has to make the blog fairly prominent so new and existing users find it in the first place.

There should also be some effort to advertise the blog on its own to try and build recurring readers. Ultimately, this all adds up to an expensive proposition to do the job well.

Make sure you engage the customer

If you skip out even on a few areas, the blog runs the risk of becoming unnoticed or unreadable. If the articles don't get the customers' interest, they won't be read. If they aren't easy and enjoyable to read, they won't be read.

If there isn't a strategy about what to write, there could be a lack of content or posts coming entirely too late for their intended events. Much worse is the chance that no one ever finds the blog. At that point, every penny invested is quite likely wasted. It's not quite an overnight thing, it's a longterm strategy.

Stay on good terms with the audience

There's also the challenge of always interacting on good terms with the reader base. If an inflammatory post ever makes it online, even accidentally, social media will ensure your name is known far and wide. This happens all the time for major news sites and can sometimes strike for socially active companies.

Over the past few years, many businesses' positions on issues of gay marriage, vegan food offerings, and even the use of the Challenger Disaster as a Fourth of July ad, have been questioned. Blog posts can backfire quickly. If there is anything at all insensitive, a sensitive viewer will find it.

That isn't to say live in mortal fear that something will go wrong. At some point, every company has a bad post. It happens. These aren't entirely negative experiences, even if they look that way on the surface.

Consider for example, the Whitemoose Cafe. It's a small cafe in Ireland, that had a massive social media flare up over some vegan food issues. There were negative reviews focusing on it. The owner had some inflammatory responses. Eventually, it caught mass attention and increased the cafe's notoriety.

For everyone that turned up against the cafe, it seems a dozen showed up to support them. Despite the negative atmosphere of a customer vs management conflict, this turned out as a massive positive. The whole flare up increased business and spread the Whitemoose's social media reach.

Will a Blog Benefit Your Business?

In all likelihood, if it's run well and gets attention, yes, it'll help. Any good resource that entertains, informs, or attracts customers should increase your site's traffic and ultimately sales.

As we've seen, even negative press can have a positive impact. The challenge is just getting them to the blog in the first place. This brings the idea of putting content where your customers will see it. If your customers are active on Facebook, like the Whitemoose Cafe's, then make a Facebook page, keep it updated, and share every blog post there.

If your customers are in a skilled trade, take out an ad or two on those trade forums. If you can do that, you can get views. If you can get views, you can work to convert them into sales and referrals. That's going to be hard to beat with anything else. Remember, just get the customer in the door.

Want to start a blog?

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Want More?

Need more insight into how to make the most out of your business? Maybe these articles can help:

How to Make Your Business Blog Shine

3 Easy Ways to Get a Standout Homepage

6 Ways to Improve Your Visibility Online

Written by Sam Costa on Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Sam is a freelance 3D generalist and video editor. His work has lead him to experiences with the cutting edge of production technology with tools like Avid, Maya, and Renderman. When he’s not working on a new effect, he’s researching game design or enjoying a good documentary.