Blogging can be a vital tool in your online marketing campaign. Many people choose not to have a blog for their shopping center because they think it will go unnoticed. Well, guess what? You’re probably right. After all, who really wants to read a long blog about your shopping center? If you think about it, your target audience is probably only interested in coupons, event details and sales promotions. So, what’s the point in blogging about other information? The truth is, even if nobody views your blog you will still benefit from it.
By Lady Madonna
Here’s a very honest example of how blogging can be beneficial for your shopping center or any business for that matter. As I write this blog, my goal is to grab the attention of shopping center owners, marketing directors, general managers or directors of operation and send them to our website. Since Agency Entourage specializes in online marketing for shopping centers, I’d like to get these individuals attention and hopefully spark their interest in our business. But let’s face it, people aren’t always going to read my blog and say, “I want to do business with that company”. So instead, I have a back up plan and it’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That means that even if nobody reads this blog, chances are that someone might come across our website when they are searching for things like “social media marketing companies” or “retail center marketing” on Google or Yahoo. You can see for yourself what I mean by typing in one of these phrases into Google. See if Agency Entourage comes up on the first page. If it does, then we’re doing our job.
You can use blogging in the same way for your shopping center. Think about who your target audience is. Let’s say your shopping center is located in Hawaii and you want to target tourists. You figure the majority of people shopping at your center are from out of town and they don’t know where the shopping hot spots are located. With this in mind, you might write a blog about the top three shopping centers in Hawaii and put your shopping center as number one. That way, when someone is visiting Hawaii and they are searching for the “Best Shopping in Hawaii” your shopping center will come up on the first page of Google. Think about it. Nobody had to read that blog in order for it to show up on Google. It showed up on Google because the words you used in your blog were related to what that person was searching for. The same would be true if I wrote a blog (which I did) about The Best Shopping Center Social Media Campaigns. Make sense?
Whether someone reads your blog or not, you can generate huge amounts of awareness with a weekly or even monthly blog for your shopping center. By increasing the chance that someone will come across your shopping center on search engines will ultimately increase the traffic to your shopping center as well.
