AccuQuote's VP of marketing and business development shares successful strategies that have worked for his company.

If your company has a blog, how is it being used? Is it simply an extension of PR, or is it a marketplace for actual dialogue? Even for companies that have launched a blog, most corporate blogs are just not being used to their full potential.

Lack of understanding
I hear all the time from other marketers that their CEO or CMO says "I don't know why we need a blog, but we just need one." To be honest, when AccuQuote launched its blog over a year ago, we didn't realize its full potential either. 

It's about leveraging touch points to create actual dialogue
I'm smart enough to know that I don't have all the answers, but our customers probably do. Your customers will tell you how you can improve your business, but only if you ask. After seeing decreasing lead conversion rates in our business, it was time to open up to our customers and ask them what they liked and disliked about our service.

After posting an open thread for feedback on our blog, we packaged it into an email with the option of responding either through the blog or by simply hitting reply to the email. To our pleasant surprise, the responses started pouring in immediately. The responses ranged from people who thought our service was the greatest they had ever received to people who flat out thought we did a lousy job. Our customers took the time to give us plenty of details to support their views along with great suggestions. Even the people who disliked our service thanked us profusely for giving them the forum to provide feedback.

If you ask for the feedback, be prepared to respond promptly
The key here is to have an internal response team. In our case, there were three of us including our CEO. We made it a priority to respond to every comment and email within one business day. It's simply a common courtesy that many companies have long forgotten.

Whose job is it to respond?
If you're leveraging your blog to communicate with your customers, then the responsibility sits with the department that normally handles customer communication. For example, this is considered a marketing function at AccuQuote. PR falls under marketing, so our PR manager and I are responsible for making sure that each comment receives a timely response. The two of us lead our internal response team and bring in our CEO and other department managers to respond when we receive a flood of responses, as well as respond to specific department-related comments.

You'll be surprised when you discover the hidden gold
A funny thing happens when you reach out to your customers… you find out that they want to do more business with you. Many of the responses we received from customers ended with a request for us to call them so that they could do more business with us. When we realized the lost-opportunity cost from not doing this communication earlier, we were disgusted with ourselves. The ROI from this communication dwarfed any previous customer email we had ever done. 

It's a strategy, not a one-shot wonder
If you're going to make the commitment to leverage your blog as a communication tool, don't simply reach out once and not follow up again. Share the impact of the feedback with your customers as well as any internal process changes that resulted. Having this type of dialogue with your customers and prospects is a continual process. Sure, it does take quite a bit of time to do it right, but the payoff is well worth it.

Sean Cheyney is the VP of marketing and business development for AccuQuote. Read full bio.