With more and more businesses adopting a blog platform instead of a website to manage their company’s internet presence, they all too easily can become a bullhorn for company announcements instead of an interface between the company and the consumers. Here are a few easy ways to turn your business blog into a tool to better understand your consumers.Online Survey Software
Building online survey software into your blog is usually as simple as adding the correct code to the correct spot, but despite its simplicity, the results can be hugely important to a business. Specific and targeted questions can be asked of visitors to obtain important information. In this way you’re not bombarding your customers with lengthy surveys, just short, pointed questions whose results can be used to alter or modify existing practices, services and products.
Tracking Visits
When building your blog, add a search box that is clearly visible above the fold, on each blog page. Use this box to search and track what your visitors and customers are looking for. This information is invaluable and may provide great insight into areas that you’re perhaps not currently servicing or providing but ought to be based on demand.
Content and Google Ranking
Using tools like Google Keywords will help you determine which applicable keywords should be used in your articles to drive your page ranking. SEO maximization and intelligent content will allow your site to be ranked higher, resulting in an increase in organic traffic. This way you can capture more market share and increase your customer base. Google Analytics will help you analyze where your visitors are coming from and which keywords they’re using to stumble upon your site. All of this is very important data to the growth of a business and is easy to use from a blog platform.
Blog Design
There is a myriad of free and inexpensive tools available on the internet that interface with your blog to perform a variety of tasks. One such tool is invaluable to business blogs:ClickTale. This tool will give you detailed information on what visitors are doing when they visit your blog. It will show scrolling behavior, where they click or hesitate to click, how quickly they jump from page to page, and how they interact with links, fields and buttons. All of this information can be used to tailor your blog to your customer base.
Business blogs no longer need to be a one-way portal of information or delivering content to readers. Today’s blogs are a two-way street; with the proper tools and analysis of the data, the blog owner can acquire a good understanding of their customers and even modify the site to make it more accessible and friendly to the particular demographic of people visiting their site. Today’s blog savvy reader wants pertinent information in a blog that is easy to navigate, and only then will they reward you with loyalty and become a customer. In order to get to that place you need to be smart and utilize these tips to turn your business blog into a tool to better understand your customers.
