How to Start Brand Promotion: Blog vs. Social Networks

How to decide where to introduce potential customers with the brand and product: Through a blog on the website or in social networks? Let’s talk about the pros and cons of the two most popular promotion channels.

At the start of a company’s promotion, it is often unclear where to first spend money, so that there are as many people as possible and customers to know about the company.

So, what to choose to start promoting a brand: A blog or social networks, or maybe both?

Blog

If a brand needs SEO-transitions to a website in order to get sales from traffic, a blog is a great solution. In addition, using a blog can show the expertise of the company.

A blog on a site performs several tasks at once:
1. The company shows itself to be an expert in the field. With the condition that it makes really useful content - the one that the audience needs.
2. Impact on SEO traffic: More indexed pages - more organic traffic from conversions.
3. It is possible to use content on other platforms: Social networks, newsletters.
4. Increased loyalty, customers trust.

Blog Tasks

To create a blog, you need to understand what functions it should perform, and what is included in the blog’s tasks.

Expertise

If a company creates blog materials correctly, for the benefit of the reader and on topics that the audience really understands, this helps to shape the brand’s expertise. To create expertise in the blog, you can include not only long-reads and professional analysis. You can use examples of work in publications, showcase your cases, awards, diplomas, tell readers about the level of brand specialists and company ratings.

SEO

SEO helps the blog advance in search engines, brings the site to a higher place in the search for key queries, thereby increasing the number of clicks. To work with SEO, it’s important to consider search queries, write sections and articles for them under the blog, and also take into account exactly how the SEO queries will be indexed.

Use of content in social networks and newsletters

Blog content can be used with adaptations for social networks and mailing. For social networks, you can shorten the text from the blog to get long reads or posts. There is a reverse story - if your pages on social networks are popular, and there are many recipients in the mailing list, then you can get additional traffic to the site from these channels by simply notifying people about the release of a new blog article.

For newsletters, just a small message is suitable that new material appeared on the company's blog on a particular topic with a call to action so that the reader goes to the site.

Increasing customers loyalty

A person reading your company’s blog is already unconsciously starting to trust you more than a brand that has neither a blog nor social media pages.
If you create content that meets the interests of you targeted audience and benefits from it, you won’t just increase the loyalty of the audience to the company, but also turn the person who clicked on the link into a regular reader.

Introducing readers to authors and professionals through first-person texts and communicating with clients in blog comments also helps increase trust.

Blog Examples

Everyone can blog: From online schools, applications, to car services. It all depends on a competent approach to this format of promotion.

A truly working blog is highly indexed, so people come to the site for search queries.

Now it’s not easy to achieve high indexing: The algorithms of search robots are updated and complicated, but if the search engine positively evaluates the traffic and usefulness of the site, you can get high traffic.

If a working blog has excellent indexing, then most of the transitions are carried out not through advertising, but from organic queries. This allows you to save on contextual advertising.

What to consider when creating a good blog

Before you start working on a blog, it is important to understand why the brand needs it and whether it is needed at all. And for this, try to identify the goals of promoting your company, and then work on getting quality traffic.

Consider behavioral factors

Search engines evaluate behavioral factors: User actions on the site. For example, the longer a visitor stays on the site, the lower he scrolls through the page, the better it is for search engines.

Diversify your blog structure

If the topic allows, and there are many high-frequency queries on it, then create sections for the most popular of them. If the semantics are not very extensive, then rely on related topics.

Finding low-competitive queries

If the competition in the market in your area goes off scale, create a special group of requests for which the visitor is more likely to come to your site. Try to find low-frequency queries that are not occupied by strong competitors, but which also have traffic.

Work on download speed

The slower the site works, the more visitors leaves it. To avoid this, you need to take into account several factors: How fast the server responds, how quickly the page of the site loads completely. The faster the better.

By the way, the biggest contribution in this case is the speed of loading images and videos. As for the pictures, they are recommended to be made no more than 1,200 px in width and height. And also choose the right type and method of compression or use special services (for example, ImageOptim online) that optimally compresses images.

But GIF animation should be discarded if you do not want to be nervous during their loading. It’s better to switch to embedded videos in webm and mp4 format, new video formats already work in browsers and weigh hundreds of times less than GIFs.

Customize your blog for mobile devices

If the site is changed for mobile devices, then search engines will like it. Carry out basic information, make convenient movement through sections, and reduce minor elements.

Work on creating a link to the site

The more brief information you can get from your link to a blog, the greater the chances that consumers will visit your site. To make the link more attractive, use the services for creating micro-markings, as well as configuring the organization’s card in search engines.

Configuring Aggregators

Often, the first places on request are occupied by aggregator sites, where you can configure a filter and select the desired resources on request. In principle, a blog site can also be added there. So it will be more convenient for users to find you exactly by request, in addition, you will increase your recognition.

How to evaluate the usefulness of your content?

Articles on professional topics of the company on the blog are good of course, but if they are written in a language that is understandable only to professionals, and they have no benefits to readers, then there is no point of the blog either.

To understand whether the content is attractive to the audience or not, you need to answer yourself three questions:

1. Whether the blog meets the needs of the target audience, this also applies to search queries.
2. Would you read the content on the blog till the end?
3. Does the audience interact with the site: Repost, save articles on social networks or on other sites?

Good blog content must meet these three criteria. If something is missing, think about what needs to be done to make the articles fit.

How to foresee blog expenses

First of all, define the goals and objectives of the blog. Do you want the blog to be able to complete all the tasks at once, or to make it work specifically for sales? All your future expenses always begin with goals.

1. Define the scope of work. What exactly do you want to see on the blog, what kind of work will help you achieve your goals?
2. Evaluate who will perform the work. Is it possible to distribute tasks within a team, do you need to hire freelancers, and if so, which ones, or do you need to hire separate employees? You might want to use UGC content - then you need to decide how people can send it to you.
3. And from this we already consider costs: Separately for employees, separately for content, and, of course, for promotion.

It is worth saying that the result will not be right away, and the work will have to be impressive, both for you and the team. The result of creating a blog cannot be estimated in a month, this is a long-term game.

Pros and Cons of a Blog

Here are some conclusions you can draw from blogs as a channel to drive traffic:

Blog Pros:

• Budget receipt of SEO traffic
• Increased sales, and it is through a search engine, and not through advertising
• Increasing the number of potential customers through useful, high-quality content

Blog Cons:

• Difficulty in creating and maintaining a blog
• Heavy expenses
• Long promotion

Social networks

To promote a brand on social networks, you need a lot of resources, but it's worth it. Thanks to social networks, you can increase brand awareness, attract new partners for cooperation, increase the number of potential customers, and subsequently sales. But again, you need to understand - what are the goals of the company?

Beginner brands that have only recently acquired pages on social networks make the same mistakes:

1. They do not make marketing strategy for working on social networks, neither set specific goals nor objectives of the work.
2. They do not study the behavior of their target audience on social networks.
3. They do not maintain the account on their own, relying on intuition and looking only at competitors.
4. They choose social networks to work on a hunch, not assessing whether the desired target audience is present there or not.
5. They do not analyze the effectiveness of work on social networks.

Features of brands that are promoted on social networks

Young promising brands are working on good profile designs on social networks, as well as creating high-quality photo content. Working with visuals is not any less important than working with content and targeted advertising.

Brands also maintain active communication with the audience, engage, and organize competitions. Establishing contact with subscribers is an important task for further good promotion, because the fate of the brand to some extent depends on the loyalty and activity of the audience.

Companies, gaining an active audience on social networks, including investing in targeted advertising and in collaboration with bloggers. Without targeted advertising with opinion leaders, even despite the company's extremely high-quality social media content, is now impossible to advance.

What you need to consider at the start to make a good page on social networks

• Decide what you need social networks for. Someone wants to increase sales, someone wants to increase traffic to the site, and someone wants to promote a new product line. Without the specific goals of the advertising campaign, it will be difficult to start the promotion.
• Start with a strategy. Before you start working with the page on social networks, you need to develop a brand promotion strategy based on goals and objectives.
• Develop design and make photo content. Do not make it look like amateur content, attract cool designers and photographers who are versed in high-quality visuals, and also think about a single page style.
• Think up a content plan and create content. Before starting, you need to pay attention to the content plan. What do you want to convey useful to the audience, how you will sell your product in publications, how to engage subscribers, what will distinguish you from the rest? All this must be taken into account in the content.
• Attract traffic. Develop a strategy for working with targeted advertising and for working with bloggers, and begin work in these areas, taking into account the goals and objectives of promotion.

What expenses to foresee for SMM

Here, just as with a blog, it all depends on your goals and financial capabilities. To work with the promotion of a major brand, you need to attract a large team of specialists. An SMM manager who will be responsible for the main promotion, including the strategy. Next - the designer and content manager, who are specifically responsible for the content component, possibly even a photographer or videographer creating production for the company.

Also, to work with advertising, we need individual specialists: For targeting, a targetologist; for working with opinion leaders, an advertising manager.

If you have a small brand, then at the start you can try to maintain the pages yourself, gradually delegating functionality to freelancers or agencies.

Count on long-term work. It’s almost impossible to get high sales from promotion on social networks of an unknown company, so be prepared. The meaning of social networks in sales is that users subscribe to the page, then for some time they get high-quality content, interact, and only then a certain percentage of the audience begins to buy products. This is all not fast at all, so there is simply no point in working with SMM for less than three months.

The disadvantages and advantages of social networks

Advantages of social networks:

• Increased brand awareness.
• Conversion of users to subscribers, and then to further sales.
• Strengthening the brand image. Pages on social networks have now become business cards for companies.

Disadvantages of social networks:

• Investments in high-quality content are required (both photo and text).
• Far from budget promotion.
• There is work with cold traffic that does not immediately convert into sales.

Summary

If you have the opportunity, try everything: Both a blog and social networks. After all, until you try, you don’t know which platform can shine. But if your budget is limited, rely on your goals and choose what matters to you.