Why Companies Are Turning to Blogs to Market Their Products
I have always enjoyed reading blogs. I love reading about other people’s experiences and knowing we all go through life’s good and bad moments together (some of us just choose to share with the rest of the blog world). One of the blogs I regularly read has recently begun promoting and featuring different products. While she has always had advertising banners in the margins of her blog, more recently she has begun featuring products within her actual blog posts. I thought this would be a great topic to explore in my managerial paper. The purpose of this paper is to dive into the success of blogs, understand why companies are looking towards bloggers for marketing, how it benefits both the blogger and the company, and the long-term sustainability for this form of advertising. The blogging world has really taken off in the last 5+years. What started out as an online forum to voice opinions and share information has turned into an overwhelming and growing industry. There are blogs about essentially any topic you can think of – sports, family and children, fitness, video games, social media, computer code, cars, fashion, event planning, business strategies – and the list just keeps going. And that’s the reason the blog world has grown so rapidly. There are blog topics and posts that anyone can connect with. Companies are taking note and have recognized that there was an untapped market in blog readers who are loyal visitors to these sites. For my personal example, I follow a handful of blogs that are people of similar stage in my life and have similar interests. As a company, this is a perfect way to target a specific market of similarly grouped people. It’s a high probability that a product my blogger likes and can relate to is also one that can easily find its way into my life. So how does it work? Since blogs began, companies have been paying for ad spots in the margins. However these companies also identified that these blogs have a captive and loyal audience.