How often has a customer walked into your office, shook your hand and told you how much he has enjoyed reading your print ads? Or that he makes a point of driving by your billboard everyday? Yes, rhetorical questions, but you get the point. There is absolutely no way you can engage your customers, let alone develop a relationship, using your usual marketing efforts - at least not on the level that blog marketing provides.

I would have to say some of the most effective use of business blogging that I have observed is that being executed by Realtors nationwide. Unlike many business bloggers however, the relationship formed with individual commentors is extended to real life, real time contact. Mr. Marriott puts out a fine blog, but it is unlikely that his commentors will engage him beyond renting one of his rooms.

“[Agents] are telling stories of how they are regularly contacted by future clients that give them the impression that they’ve already met:

“I’ve been reading your blog for months.”
“I feel like I already know you.”

….[agents] explain how ‘funny’ it is because the relationship seems to have been incubated in the minds of their reader, but yet, they still have a lot to learn about their newly acquired clients.
(source)

Blogging allows Realtors to showcase themselves as the niche expert in their market area. As one agent stated, “many consumers now search for the cities real estate blogs to find an agent.” Gaining client trust is a necessary initial stage in any business relationship. Blogging takes a great deal of the hard work out of building that trust. An established Realtor blog is going to have archives of evidence testifying to that agent’s market acumen as well as client feedback attesting to the value of their service.

Are your customers searching for you? If your competition is blogging and you are not, who do you think is going to get the business?

Related:

• Blogs Built for Real Estate

Tags: adi, blog, Blog Marketing, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogs, Business, competition, consumers, content, corporate, corporate-blog, corporate-blogging, deal, feed, hr, im, IT, marketing, marriott, office, PR, reader, reading, real-estate, real-estate-blogging, realtor, realtors, real_estate, RSS, search, trust, typepad, XP

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 5:17 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.