Although social media and content marketing is commanding a lot of buzz and marketing budgets these days, smart businesses are not underestimating the power of blogging as an essential tactic for business marketing. A Corporate blog is a blog that is published and maintained by a brand or business in order to reach its organisational goals.
From brands across medical, beauty, electronic, fashion industries to services like consulting and banking, smart brands and small businesses are already leveraging corporate blogs as a way of getting the word out, promoting their business and engaging with their target audience. Apart from the perks of directly engaging with people interested in and searching for your product genre online, the power of editors, journalists and influencers as gatemen to reaching your target audience is significantly whittled when you move way from chasing influencers to leveraging the power and potential of blogs as a component and ultimately a central hub of all your online and social media efforts.
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Though social media matters a lot, it is not everything. Apart of the danger of building all your digital assets on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and every other social media platform which you do not own, not everyone is on social media waiting for your status updates, tweets and pictures. Just as interruptive marketing, most communication on social media simply brings your brand conversations into the already discussing community of gazillion conversations going on online. You therefore need to add business blogging to your content marketing arsenal.
Lots of African brands are already leveraging this technique to bring contextual selling, lifestyle offering and content marketing to reach their target market. Here are some top African blogs to inspire you;
Travelstart is one of Africa’s largest online travel booking websites and it is one brand leveraging the power of providing timely, relevant and contextual content to reach their target market. Present in each of South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey with each market having its own local blog. Creating several blogs for each country is a smart approach that ensures that cultural and regional differences in tastes and preferences of the different countries are used to create amazing articles relevant to travel lovers in each local market.
Since articles and blogs are great for search engine optimizations, people searching online for information about travel and vacation destinations are sure to come in contact with TravelStart’s thorough articles and will be lured into allowing TravelStart lead them on that journey – profitably of course.
This is a video blog powered by GTBank, one of Africa’s leading financial brands leading digital innovation across Africa. GTBank’s corporate blogs started with creating an independent brand, Ndani which had become a popular media lifestyle brand. Apart from building and engaging its target market through its amazing video content, the brand has turned its one-video channel into a boutique of video programmes covering lifestyle, comedy, music and entertainment in general.
While Ndani has become its more popular vlog, the brand is also gradually creating a more formal corporate blog, 635 GTBlog (635.gtbank.com/) while maintaining another for one of its youth banking product, GTcrea8 (gtcrea8.com/).
3. MTN Blog — South Africa
While most corporate websites are popular for corporate speak and ‘corporatese’ language, MTN South Africa launched an independent blog to create another channel to connect to its audience by embedding its products into lifestyle articles, creative and images. thereby turning its products into a lifestyle brand.
The MTN Blog will inspire you on how to develop a blog as a central hub for all your online activities. It also shows how embedding your products into the lifestyle of your target audience connects in a whole new way. Maintaining a corporate blog ensures you are able to get your content out in the digital space faster than newspaper and online editors will. Deploying creative and visual communications beats articles by a mile and helps the MTN brand connect to its target audience in a more personal and meaningful way.
Who said Coca-Cola are not the masters of storytelling? This brand is definitely rocking Africa with the sound of music powered by some of Africa’s finest musical talents. Coke Studio Africa
brings together artistes from different countries, genres, eras and regions to create a modern and authentic sound through music and there is a lot to learn from.
As against its huge budget of heavy TV and bill board advertising, Coca-Cola’s Content 2020 strategy focuses on content as one of its main drivers of engagement. A lot can be learned from their branded content website, leveraging the influence of artistes and musicians and the use of repurposing and optimizing content for each social media platform. Mix Coke Studio Africa with the amazing success of #ShareaCoke and #Openhappiness and you’ve got a brand planning to stay relevant for a long time through pure Content Marketing Excellence.
5. Safaricom
Safaricom is one of Africa’s leading telecommunications company offering a wide range of mobile, fixed and data service across Kenya. Just in case you didn’t know, Safaricom pioneered commercial mobile money transfer globally through its M-PESA, the most successful of such service anywhere in the world.
The Safaricom Blog exemplifies the power of visual communications in blogging, I simply loved the blog. The Safaricom brand uses the blog to engage its target audience by delivering timely articles, tips and sales promotion incentives to ensure its numerous and potential customers remain engaged, informed and inspired.
We already know people and small business can achieve awesome results by using personal blogs for building credibility and profits, but blogging for promoting brands is a different ball game entirely. Beyond using it as another selling platform, it is a great channel for connecting directly with your target market. Corporate blogging provides contextual value to your target market by delivering content that enshrines your credibility while sales will naturally become a fringe benefit.
So over to you. Which corporate blogs are pleasant to look at, strategic in their approach and effective in their delivery of value. Share your Africa examples
