Companies have before them a wealth of digital tools at their disposal whether it’s to analyze data, boost performance or manage social media presence. A treasury of riches large enough to cause full-blown decision paralysis.

Where should I spend my money? What’s the best tool for my needs, and really, what are my full-needs? But I’m a small company; is there really a point to invest in a tool?

It’s a resounding yes on that last question and the tool you should invest in is an RSS feed reader – and RSS feeds in general. 

What is RSS Feed and How to Use It?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and has been around since the Internet became widely available to the general population. It’s the earliest protocol to weave connections between blogs and their readers so that readers could subscribe to a site’s RSS feed and receive new posts into an RSS reader as soon as they were posted.

RSS readers syndicated content from multiple feeds, which saved users time in going through each site manually to check for updates and read. This core functionality has stayed the same, but RSS readers have evolved significantly in terms of power and functionality. 

Why Are RSS Feeds Important? 

RSS feeds have become relevant again for the same reasons RSS was invented in the first place – they save massive amounts of time for individual users, who don’t want to be caught in a cycle of site hopping.

We’re also at a place where content has never been created and shared at such speed and intensity, so RSS feeds are once again the best bet to declutter time spent online. Given RSS feeds stronger functions and features, businesses can fully take advantage of this protocol.

6 Ways Business Owners Can Benefit from Using RSS Feed

RSS wonderfully complements a brand’s marketing strategy and outreach efforts, because it works in both directions. You’re able to disseminate your content to a wider audience, creating a solid foundation for stronger brand-customer relationships and repeat sales.

Brands can also draw information about the digital world around them from trade press to social media publications in order to gain market insights and a better sense of public sentiment. 

1 – Use RSS to Reach More People

RSS has fallen out of ubiquity but hasn’t lost its entire audience. You’ll find out there are many pockets of Internet users, who rely on RSS readers to manage their reading, whether they want to organize their personal reading or do it out of professional necessity.

It makes absolute sense to turn to RSS – it’s centralized, designed around a user’s preferences and needs, easy to customize and follow at one’s own pace. Democratizing your content by sharing it on RSS feeds connects you to an audience you didn’t even know existed, and being indexed means you exist in RSS readers’ databases and can be easily discovered through search. 

2 – Easily Update New and Current Customers

Not everyone actively follows corporate social media accounts and in recent years customers are more and more averse to receiving promotional newsletters. That leaves your hands somewhat tied as to how to connect with customers.

RSS gives casual RSS users a low-effort opportunity to check in with what interests them whenever they feel like it without having to suffer from information overload. More and more people look to declutter their online spaces. Maintaining corporate RSS feeds gives customers the opportunity to tune in without being bombarded by you. 

3 – Talk About Promotions And Events

It’s in your best interest to utilize every information channel to build buzz surrounding events – be they live or digital due to pandemic restrictions – or time-sensitive promotions. Email digests are the sort of tool brands would use for this type of promotion, but how often do newsletters fall into the spam folder or are outright deleted?

RSS updates feed in real-time and leave new updates for users to read at their own pace, which is a more customer-centric approach altogether.

4 – Monitor Your Brand

No matter what size your company is you must monitor your brand. Marketing is a fine interplay between action and reaction to market shifts and social perception. You can’t run a campaign that bases itself on your brand’s virtues, while customers and the industry at large drag it online, and hope for a positive outcome.

Between the ability to subscribe to Google Alerts and relying on superior native search in your RSS reader, brands can now notice every single mention online and act accordingly. You might discover nearly no one is talking about you. That’s a good starting point in itself – why is that and how can you change it? 

5 – Plan Better Campaigns

RSS can be harnessed to perform the now-essential research behind social media listening as well as social media monitoring, which gives you opportunities to track your campaigns and gain crucial insights into their overall performance.

Through careful filtration and automation, RSS readers like Inoreader return data on social media engagement with branded hashtags and company mentions, but it’s important to also pay attention to what your non-branded keywords return as results.

Do you fully understand where your target customers spend their time online? Do you know what they consider valuable and useful in a product? Do you know how your competitors are faring? All these data points further target your campaigns to better results. 

RSS opens a whole different communication channel with customers, which can lead to long-term repeat purchases. After you’ve already built your audience through RSS, you can use RSS to then notify of any new products entering your catalogs. This works well whether you’re restocking an old item that’s been sold out in the past or launching a whole new product or service.

Rather than have the responsibility fall on the customer to check your e-store or catalogue, you’re doing the work for them and removing additional barriers to moving units to repeat customers.