The information gap between African businesses and the customers, a trend caused by high advertising costs, could be reduced significantly if the companies embrace blogging and form partnership with bloggers.
According to Robert Alai, chief blogger at Techmtaa.Com, blogging has a vast of unexplored benefits waiting for discovery that could reap maximum benefits to advertisers.
Speaking at the 2012 East Africa Com conference in Nairobi, Kenya, on Wednesday, Alai said blog advertising is a lucrative business to venture into with top businesses in South Africa and Egypt already investing in blog advertising.
This has seen their market presence increase significantly, says Alai.
Alai added that unlike mainstream media including radio and television that offer advertising, blogging is relatively cheaper and yields equally good results.
He however feels more can be done to develop blogging habits in Africa.
“Mobile blogging should be implemented in order to enhance growth of blogging,” he said.
Social media has also since brought competition to blogs, says Alai, since everybody out there owns a small ‘blog’ in terms of their social pages, Facebook and Twitter profiles.
At present, Africa’s music industry has since started yielding blogging benefits and are partnering with music companies to promote musicians and their content via blogging through the social media.
In Kenya, gospel artiste Juliani has made efforts to use blogging to promote his efforts. The musician intends to partner with Alai in doing a rendition of different songs, in a social media way.
Alai said this would give the musician the needed exposure, as it would be much easier for people to access the music on social media.
In addition to increasing product visibility of a company, blogs also give a chance for immediate feedback from customers and critics, a practice that is essential for bettering service delivery to customers.
Study shows companies that do a lot of blog marketing, get better and direct-to the point feedback from their customers, and if taken seriously, sales figures experience tremendous turn around.
