Business Impacts of Blogs

The thought of blogging being one’s mindless ramblings has changed and evolved to a vehicle with which businesses use to attract new customers, convert leads, and engage current customers. In this digital age that we live in, we as a company need to embrace this content-rich and aesthetically-pleasing tool to improve customer engagement and promote brand awareness.   Blogs will enable us to do this by their ability to drive web traffic.  

The way blogs work in driving web traffic is for every blog post created we index another page on our website. With blogs being created every week we can index multiple pages which would show activity on our website which would boost our rankings in a search engines like Google. Typically, our webpage gets updated every so often making its activity almost stagnant, with our users typically seeing the same images and messages during their visits. Without seeing much freshness, we are not converting the right percent of visits into sales. By creating a blog on our webpage we will be able to drive more web traffic from organic searches and links from social media sites which will convert into a higher volume of sales.

We here at Kohl’s are in the clothing business and our customers are able to purchase more when they are able to see more. When users are able to visualize how our clothing fits into their lifestyle or how our product looks in an entire outfit they are inclined to buy not just single items, but whole outfits and products. By creating a clothing and lifestyle blog on our website we can create more organic searches from Google and also have our users sharing our content on social media platforms from Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and even their own blogs. By showcasing new product lines and styles we create new forms of advertising, which are currently less expensive than our paid ad searches.  Not only are they less expensive but we have tracked some of our products shared on some of the most well-known fashion blogs and we have seen a 30% increase in their sell-thru within 2 weeks of the blog post.

In order for our venture into blogging to work we need to pursue a fashion blogger with a healthy following. This will not only bring their following with them, but we will also be able to introduce our customers who are not familiar with this blogger or blogs to this exciting platform. In our estimation to bring a blogger on would cost Kohl’s $100,000 a year. We currently have the infrastructure to create a blog page for the blogger and also the social media platforms to help expand its reach. While building up the blog we need to exit the paid search form of advertising as the creation of blogs will supplement this expenditure. We currently spend close to our competitors JC Penney in paid Google searches with $2.46 million a year. Our paid searches are no longer converting into sales as we hoped and we are encouraged by the initial conversion that blogs and social sharing have given us. We feel that creating blogs are our future in creating web-traffic and will help boost our revenue streams and reduce current advertising expenses.