There are so many good reasons for small businesses to use blogging as an essential marketing and communications tool that I can only hope my occasional examples turn the light bulbs on for those who still don’t yet see the value.

Lincoln Sign Company in Lincoln, NH – a company that makes and installs all manner of custom signs and not exactly the first kind of business you think of when you think Web2.0 – has been blogging for several years and is a great model for what a small business can do with this tool.

One of the things they recently initiated was a way to use the blog as a way to tell the complete story of a sign as it is being made in their shop.

Our new strategy can be summed up as follows; “We are not using our blog to sell signs, we are using our blog to sell the EXPERIENCE of getting a sign.”

As we create a sign in-house, we blog about it throughout the process, and it enables us to interact with our customers as a new way. We also use it as a selling point.

“At the end , you get more than a sign, you get a sign, AND the story of how that sign was made.”

We have also just started providing our customers with “Memory Boxes”. Basically paint samples, scrap materials, hand-written notes, etc. The flotsam and jetsam of making a sign

This post sums up their new approach

This is such a smart way to use content as a marketing strategy. They get great buy in from the customer as to the value of the process (my guess is they aren’t the cheapest around), they create a story that can be used over and over again and they automatically create web content that brings them search engine traffic.