What are the advantages of a corporate blog?

Question

I'm going to make a presentation to a few decision makers in the following week and I'm trying to gather good reasons to start a corporate blog. Since we're handling a low budget, it's not in the plans to hire anyone especifically to manage or create content but use the employees to do some research and write an article.

So what are the most relevant advantages of having a corporate blog? The most up-voted answer will be accepted as I'll probably benefit of every contribution.

Additional details:

• Wholesale business only.
• The only marketing investment so far was an institutional site.

Answer 1

The good thing about good corporate blogs is that they put a personal face on the organisation. Employees writing honestly about their company, not just churning out press releases, build interest and trust.

What I'm not so sure about is how much this applies to a wholesale business as the people buying from you are trying to do the best thing by their company, rather than what they think is best for them. So whilst there are any number of articles about their about "using social media to promote your business" most of them are probably written for business to consumer companies, rather than business to business.

However, as all it's going to cost is a bit of time, it's worth giving it a go. What are your competitors doing? What are other wholesale companies in a different line of business doing? You could research that and get ideas from them.