The Halo Effect, Brand Strength And Business Blogging

In 1920, American psychologist Edward Thorndike published a paper which gave details of what he called the ‘halo effect’, five years after discussing the topic in one of his many studies around educational behaviour.

Having been studied heavily by a number of psychologists since, the halo effect has come to describe the process of an individual or organisation being thought of in a particularly positive light due to excelling in one specific area.  In its most basic commercial form, it showcases that if a brand does one thing really well, their audience will come to think of them as a being a generally great company.

A phrase you’re likely to be familiar with if you’re an experienced marketer, as the halo effect can essentially be the driving force behind a fantastic brand and its success, we want to provide details on the association with blogging, as it can very easily prove to be the perfect tool to achieve the halo effect for your brand.

Your customers need to see success

One of the key points to achieving or witnessing the halo effect is to ensure your customers can see what you’re doing well.  They need to see the success you’re achieving on a specific channel or with a certain procedure.  We can all showcase testimonials from our past customers and these are without doubt fantastic, but you’re effectively just telling people how good you are – you need to be showing them.

You don’t need to show how good you are at everything, but you need to have something that you’re particularly fantastic at, something that will make people stop and think.  It’s a common misconception that you have to show your positive qualities in regards to something that you’re actually offering, such as a product or service.  Although it obviously helps to have great products or services, the halo effect can be achieved by having a positive response to other activities, which is why a business blog can prove to be the perfect option.

Happy customers are customers who are being engaged with

The basic principle behind the halo effect with regards to business is when customers see an organisation doing something particularly well, they see the company in an overall positive light.  Having an unbelievable impact on brand strength, if you can satisfy a large number of customers in one way, they’ll be satisfied with your brand overall.

With business blogging, you get to reach to what could, in theory, be your entire past, present and potential audience.

Generally speaking, a blog is a public platform.  It’s one that as long as you have access to the internet, you will be able to view.  It’s a platform that allows the organisation to speak to their audience on a vast array of different topics.

You can cover product information, service updates or company news.  You can give your own take on the industry, provide details of your internal developments or simply just offer something that’s going to make your audience smile.

Whatever it is, it’s a form of customer engagement – and as customer requirements are increasingly being focused around an improved level of engagement from brands, the more a customer is engaged with, the more satisfied they are.

Business blogging is affordable

And whilst a high level of effective customer engagement is possible through other channels, one of the key reasons why blogging is such a suitable option is because it is one of the most cost-effective resources you can utilise.

The basic focus of business blogging is to provide customer-focused content to as many people as possible.  Taking this offline, let’s imagine you wanted to provide the same content to all of your customers in a bi-weekly newsletter.  With a distribution list of even just 1,000 regular readers, if we said creating, printing and posting the newsletter cost the equivalent of £1.50 per newsletter, that’s £3,000 per month to deliver your messaging to your audience.

As of September 2012, our blogging strategies start at just £350 per month.   And we have other business blogging services that come in under that price, too.

Blogging is in no way an easy option to achieving the halo effect and just like any other process, it’s not a guaranteed way to do so either.  However, when carried out effectively, business blogging can deliver all of the basic principles required behind the halo effect, suggesting that a properly developed and implemented business blogging strategy can have much more of an impact than simply ensuring you are continually communicating with your target audience.

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