How's Blogging Helping Startups with Local and Hyperlocal Marketing
Bloggers are today's influencers and they know their locality and city the best.
Traditional advertisement methods can be an expensive affair for start-ups because they operate on a shoe-string budget. To have a website or a blog is a boon for them as it positively impacts their business and helps it spread. Blogging is the most effective way of “pull marketing”. It is all about providing value to your visitors. It is about making them conscious about what is available and if you can provide valuable information, they will be attracted towards your services.
Today internet is flooded with websites and the netizen is overwhelmed with the amount of information being shared. Blogging is an effective tool to make your presence felt and help your start-up stand out in the competition.
Blogging can help your start-up in different ways:
Blogging gives a clear idea about your start-up. It also helps in getting feedback from your potential customers.
It improves your site’s SEO ranking. The more active you are on your blog, the greater is the chance of it being ranked higher in the search engine and that helps a lot in remaining in circulation.
It helps in building a loyal customer base even before you start selling anything. People get attracted to your ideas and will remain eager to see when you actually launch your product/services in the market.
Good ideas attract investors. Remaining active on your blog will help you catching the interest of investors who are constantly looking for new entrepreneurs with good ideas.
A blog which talks of a local community, its habits, its streets and the local flavour which are by and large ignored by media houses, is popular in the area to which it is specific. Start-ups take the help of such blogs to create awareness among the locals about the products/services they offer. It helps in generating new leads which can be converted to potential buyers.
Prospective buyers find a platform where they can share their requirements and a blog can help in monitoring the online presence and reputation. A blog gives the idea of the product/services being offered by a start-up so that people can avail of the same.
Gurgaon-based hyper-local start-up ‘findyahaan’ is a market place connecting service providers with service seekers by operating in a fixed location. It essentially helps in finding service providers in music, fitness instructors, chefs and tutors. The blog about this start-up made people aware of this service and by far, it has nearly four lakh customers in Jaipur, Gurgaon and Delhi NCR.
Mycity4Kids is also such a start-up which was started in 2010 in Gurgaon. The basic idea behind this start-up is "to reach out to all moms and ensure that the job of parenting never takes away the joy from it," says Vishal Gupta, one of the co-founders. This start-up helps parents in raising their kids without being burnt out. They take care of their schooling, coaching, holiday plans and everything that has to do with children. They also host blogs on parenting where subject experts offer their advice.
These web blogs also provide news and information in the start-up business to keep everyone abreast. Take for example dealcurry. It posted about the new acquisition that health start-up Portea had recently. This gives the client an idea about the changes being made to provide better health care by Portea.
Not all start-ups are involved in selling products/services. Many start-ups are involved in awareness campaigns too. One such example is YourDost which features in Trak.in. This start-up has saved nearly 70,000 people from committing suicide. This is one-of-a kind start-up which deals with the emotional well being of people in need of professional counselling. YourDost found a place in a website which shared the information. It is a great help to a society which is constantly under stress. Starting off as a goodwill gesture in Bengaluru, YourDost now has a pan-India presence.
There are pitfalls in this too. Do not overstuff your blog and post every few minutes. WordPress allows you to phase the release of your posts so you can actually control when and how much you should post. Depending on blogs for your marketing strategy of your start-up should not be your only option. It can be an effective and powerful tool but, it needs to be used intelligently to give results.
