Can You Afford Not To Use Blog Marketing?

Karen Lefkowitz of "My Educated Guess" blog, asks the question in the title of her post, What’s your experience with blogs?

Should we look at blogging as a marketing channel?

Whether she was being rhetorical is not understood, but she does cite a recent study (requires registration for entire report) performed by KnowledgeStorm in partnership with Universal McCann. The press release regarding the study indicates that:

The survey was completed by more than 4,500 business and IT professionals globally, representing a variety of job titles, vertical industries and company sizes. "With this particular study, our goal was to determine marketing opportunities with blogs and RSS," says Stacy Malone, vice president, interactive media director, Universal McCann. "Blogs and RSS have quickly progressed into a mainstream medium. Blogs, in particular, give marketers the perfect opportunity to generate demand, nurture leads and stay connected with customers."

The figures of interest of the respondents surveyed state:

• 80% read blogs;
• 51% read blogs once a week;
• 53% read blogs weekly for business information;
• 57% read weekly on technology topics;
• 70%  pass along information or content from blogs;
• 53% indicate that blogs influence their purchase decisions;
• 32% are thinking of starting their own blogs;
• 31% subscribe to RSS feeds; and
• 36% access blogs through RSS feeds.

I’m not sure of how their study was conducted or what types of people were surveyed, but these are powerful marketing numbers.  Blogs are becoming a powerful marketing tool and your business cannot ignore these types of numbers.