What lessons in blogging for business can we take from an old bike?
I’ve been thinking about getting my bike repaired. It will need quite a lot of work doing to it with pretty much everything except the frame and the lights needing replacing. Would it make more sense to replace it rather than repair it?
So when an ad for an electric bike popped up onto my Facebook feed (how does Mr Z know when to do that?), it caught my attention.
I clicked onto the “more” button and was interested by the website.
And then…
Almost nothing. No content to move me from Interested to “I want this.”
They did provide a couple of videos on YouTube on how to build the bike and on how to turn the integrated lighting system on. The videos might have been useful, if a bit self explanatory, after I had bought the bike, but I was still at the Interested stage and not ready to buy. They also had a review from one of their Ambassadors, but that was it.
The bike looked good, I could see myself on it on long journeys into the countryside. But at another part of my brain were the thoughts that an electric bike, that is just lazy, use your legs more, and Replacing is such a waste, get it repaired.
In the meantime, Mr Z was planting more ads from competing bike manufacturers on my feed. And they did provide me with some good content, which has got close to moving me to the decision to change from push bike to electric bike.
The first company had an offer on their website. A free trial. If you lived in certain areas, they would bring a bike to you, and you could try it out. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” I thought and applied for the trial. I received an email back saying that they were no longer running the trial, but that once I had bought the bike, I had 30 days in which to return it, no questions asked. Yeah, right, I’m really going to return it once I’ve built it, and who is paying for it to be returned?
Had the first company given me more information, perhaps a post on how much more I would use my electric bike than a push bike because of the greater range I would now have, or how I could now cycle to my business meeting and not be dripping in sweat when I got there, I would probably have placed the order.
Now I have a choice of three bikes.
Research on blogging for business
Why is it so important for businesses to blog?
The obvious answer is to use blogging as a tool to drive traffic to your website either through Search Engine Optimisation or through the use of Social Media. These are both huge subjects and beyond the scope of this post, but will be addressed in subsequent posts.
There is research to show ( http://bit.ly/3swgJw2 ) that 60% of all internet users actively read blogs . Businesses with an active blog get 99% more links to their website and twice as much traffic. We all want more links to our websites and more traffic.
I always have some reservations about statistics such as these. 99% of cats prefer XX? Mine eats anything. How do they know a cat’s preference?
But if we take real life examples based on our own experience, as I have done with my bike purchase, we can see the real value of blogging about our products and services. You will have gone through the same exercise, looking for information, Googling, checking YouTube and review sites like Trust Pilot. You have questions and you want answers before you take that decision to buy, whether that is offline or online. Reading blogs can help answer those questions and persuade you to make that purchase.
Conclusion
There are three lessons I would draw from my old bike.
- Buyers want as much information as you can provide to them. If you do not take the opportunity to persuade, you could lose the sale.
- Where in the customer journey you place that information is important. Showing someone how to build the bike before they have taken the decision to buy does not help much with that decision
- If you don’t provide those answers to your potential buyer, the buyer will keep looking. And your competitors are only too happy to give them those answers.
We cannot just provide content for the sake of it, or write about what we want to write about to be successful.
Effective blogging for business will provide the right content to the right audience at the right time. But we need all three to be aligned at the same time. Replace a Right with a Wrong, and the effectiveness could be lost.
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