Brand Experience Strategy Mistakes: Even Though It's Just a Blog!

By Mike Brown, Brainzooming (Facilitator of the upcoming TMSA Marketing Bootcamp in Chicago)

Does it matter if your business has a blog or not? And if your business does have a blog, does it matter how often you update it? While you’re thinking about the answers to those questions, peruse these dates and see if you can spot a pattern?

November 23, 2013 and November 8, 2013
September 29, 2014 and August 5, 2014
June 30, 2013 and January 31,2013
May 16, 2013 and May 16, 2013
September 3, 2014 and July 25, 2014
Can you guess what connects these dates? Read on.

Brand Experience Strategy – From Online to In Real Life
I was invited to a networking event the other evening. The organizers for the event were so well organized, they provided an Excel workbook in advance listing all confirmed invitees with an email address and a LinkedIn profile. I took advantage of the organizers’ beneficial jump start and reviewed the websites for most attendees. Going through the various websites, the state of their blogs was quite surprising and signaled multiple brand strategy mistakes.

Brand Experience Strategy Mistake #1
I was surprised at how many of the networking event participants didn’t have company blogs on their websites. Not having a blog translates to less website traffic, fewer situations to connect with and deliver value to customers and prospects, and multiple missed sales opportunities.

Brand Experience Strategy Mistakes #2
Of those networking event participants that did have company blogs, most of them were sporadically updated. In fact the list of dates above is the most recent and second most recent blog update for a number of companies present at the networking event. If your business is going to introduce a blog, the blog becomes part of your brand experience, whether YOU act like it is or not. Yup, it’s part of your brand experience strategy along with all the other elements that have comprised a brand for a long time.

Think about what these dates might mean for other brand experience elements:

• Imagine not handling a customer service call since November 23, 2013.
• Imagine not making a sales call since June 30, 2013.
• Imagine going from early August to late September of this year without ever monitoring the quality of your product or service.

Yet, when you put a blog on your website, you are making it a very visible part of your brand experience. And if you hardly ever update it, it says volumes about your brand experience, especially to prospects that don’t have any REAL experience to judge your brand.

• If you mainly share valuable info on your blog, sporadic updates convey you don’t have much of value to share.
• If you mainly share your CEO’s ideas, sporadic updates convey your CEO doesn’t have many ideas.
• If you mainly share company news, sporadic updates convey there’s not much going on at your company.

And so it goes.

A Brand Experience Strategy Gift
So rather than connecting on LinkedIn or meeting for coffee, the best thing I have to offer my fellow networking event attendees is this:

If you’re going to have a company blog, update it regularly and with valuable content. If you aren’t going to do that, delete your blog so you just look like a brand that’s behind the times and not one that ignores its brand experience! Or better yet, let’s get together for coffee and talk about how to fix your blog strategy. See you at the TMSA Marketing Bootcamp!