Business Blogging | Drive More Traffic, Own Your Marketplace | Traffic University
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Blogging is essential to lead generation, website traffic and - if done right - building a brand that lasts. Who knew blogging was so important? An effective business blog is vital to connect with potential customers, cultivate existing business relationships and, yes, drive traffic to your site. So why aren’t you doing it? Because you know it’s hard, and that without a workable strategic plan to share your knowledge with the world, your blog isn’t going to get off the ground, let alone reach many readers. This deck, with notes included, originates from a 90-minute course that covers the essentials of business blogging, and what it takes to turn blogging efforts into both a brand awareness and lead generation channel.
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Business Blogging | Drive More Traffic, Own Your Marketplace | Traffic University
- 1. Blogging for Business: Own Your Marketplace, Drive More Traffic October 2014 www.traffic-prm.com 1 Brian Posnanski @Bpoz brian@traffic-prm.com
- 2. 2 Blogging – noun, | bläg | 1. act by which an individual publishes commentary, opinions, thoughts and stories on a regular basis. 2. a marketing tactic known to generate leads. 3. something that scares the %#*& out of marketers and business owners.
- 3. #TrafficU 3 WHY BLOG? Entry Points SEO Sales Support Content Driver
- 5. #TrafficU Smashing Blogging Myths 5 If you build it…?
- 6. #TrafficU Smashing Blogging Myths 6 Two-thirds of Curata’s “10K Business Blogging Club” have less than $100M in revenue
- 7. #TrafficU Smashing Blogging Myths 7 Blogging should be central to your lead generation!
- 8. Blogging Success Factors 1. Strategy 2. Quality 3. Production 4. Distribution 5. Analytics 8
- 9. Strategy A Good Blogging Strategy is Really a Good Content Strategy that Should: 1. Speak to Your Buyer 2. Map to Your Funnel 3. Build Your Position 9
- 10. #TrafficU 10 • Awareness TOFU • Interest • Education • Consideration MOFU • Trigger Content BOFU
- 11. #TrafficU Strategy 11 When thinking about your content strategy, think about the position in your industry or category you want to own – then work to stake your claim
- 12. #TrafficU Strategy 12 Importance of Phone Calls Writing Inbound Marketing
- 13. Quality Think like a publisher Where does expertise live inside of your organization? MINE FOR IT 250-750 words 75 / 25 rule – original vs curated “Epic” vs routine content 13 There is no substitute for creating high-quality content!!!
- 14. Quality Variety is the Spice of… Good Blogging! 1. Original Commentary 2. Guest Posts 3. Q&A’s 4. Interviews 5. Tutorials and How To’s 6. Customer Stories 7. Resources or Lists 8. Cheatsheets, Checklists and To Do’s 9. Videos 10. Infographics 14 Use popular blog formats and types to keep things fresh
- 15. Production Developing Your Blogging/Content Team Editor Internal SMEs Copywriters Designers Contributors SEO / Optimization Social Media Team 15 Blogging is not an activity of one. There is no “I” in team!
- 16. #TrafficU Production 16 Frequency of publishing is vital!
- 17. #TrafficU Distribution 17 Newsletter Social Media Guest Articles
- 18. #TrafficU Analytics 18 Traffic Unique Visitors Unique Sessions Retention & Engagement Pageviews Session Duration / Avg Time on Site # of Pages per Visit Bounce Rate (Low) Lead Generation New Leads Generated (MQLs) Existing Leads Touched Lead Scoring Sales Conversions Return on Investment % and $ of opportunities influenced % and $ of opportunities won
- 19. #TrafficU Structure 19 Source: WHAT you are built on is important for: Ease of use Optimization / SEO Control and Ownership
- 20. #TrafficU 20 Let’s Talk! Brian Posnanski @Bpoz brian@traffic-prm.com www.traffic-prm.com
Notes de l'éditeur
- Blogging in many ways has been a stepchild of the marketing world. The proclamation that “blogging is dead” has been sounded more than once. While many folks view it as a “nice to have,” it often gets lost in the larger bucket of marketing stuff to do because: Business owners and marketers are not exactly certain what, if any, benefits it offers. It’s difficult. Writing long form content on a regular basis is not easy to do, and resources are limited, especially at small and mid size organizations. As a day in and day out marketing activity, however, nothing is more important.
- Blogging is vital for a number of reasons: SEO – Google, especially post-Panda and post-Penguin Google, wants to see good fresh content served up regularly. Every time you publish a blog post, you are increasing your website real estate by a factor of one page. Adding more content helps to lift the whole boat in terms of search visibility. Entry Points – Think about how many times you search for something and see blog posts in the results. Blog posts can be important entry points or windows into your business, if you’re writing about topics people care about. Sales Support – Give your sales team “air cover” with rich content and stuff they can regularly use in their communications and follow up with prospects. Content Driver – Blog content can help to fuel all of your marketing efforts, including your newsletters and especially social media, which are hungry for original content.
- It’s up to you… the biggest decision you have to make is if your corporate blogging effort is simply a checkbox in your overall marketing effort, or something you prioritize as a lead engine and something that feeds all of your marketing. Say no to checkbox marketing. Do blogging right, and you could see amazing results for your business.
- Let’s focus first on three myths related to blogging. First up: blogging can help you build your field of dreams, but… If you build it… they may not come! We are familiar with the thinking in digital marketing. If you spend time creating and publishing a beautiful website with great content, people will naturally find it. Right? And the same thing goes for blogging. Build it and they will come. But that is not the case. You have to have the right success factors in place. That means not only creating great and useful content, but making sure people can find it.
- Curata did a study that focused on discovering what set the most successful business blogs apart from the rest of the pack. Their study found that highly successful business blogs get at least 10,000 pageviews per month. They called this group the “10K Blogging Club.” What’s more, Curata found that more than two-thirds of these companies were small and mid-size businesses. Successful blogging, or doing blogging frequently and well, is not the domain of the Fortune 500 or well-established companies. So that’s Myth #2: Just because you have a small team or limited resources is no excuse not to make blogging a vital part of your lead gen efforts. You can play David to Goliath!
- The biggest myth is that blogging is simply another part of your marketing mix, and that while it may help to build your visibility, it’s not necessarily a proven and effective marketing technique. Nothing could be further from the truth. Blogging plays a direct role in your lead generation efforts. Both of these bits of research from Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing report show a clear correlation between frequency of blogging and leads generated. In fact, those company that surpass more than 50 total published blog posts should see a rise in their lead generation.
- These are the 5 success factors you need to think about to make your blogging efforts a success.
- Blogging can feed all aspects of your content marketing. It’s the canvas you use to throw out ideas, see what works, and then refine, refine, refine. You need to have a strategy when you blog. Ironically, starting at the beginning is the step that so few marketers and business owners fail to take, in their rush to get to tactics. Don’t start with tactics. Focus first on creating a blogging/content strategy that Speaks to Your Buyer, Maps to Your Funnel and Builds Your Position.
- Let’s talk about the first two steps: speaking to your buyer, and mapping to your funnel. When defining your content/blogging strategy, start first with defining your buyer. This means not just knowing what their title is and where they sit in the organization, or even the demographic your product or service is supposed to address. It means digging deeper to figure out what your buyer cares about, what their pain points are, and how you can help them. This is the root of defining your “buyer personas.” This kind of information is often not found in marketing research, which focus on things like how much your prospective buyers purchase in a given year, or who they’re buying from right now. Go the extra mile by extracting their challenges and pain points. Make them real by making them human. Get a focus group going. Talk to your sales folks about the kinds of conversations they’re having with customers. CALL your customers. Get to know them. The next step is being able to plot your content up and down the sales funnel. For instance, is your product or service relatively new? You’ll need more content at the top of the funnel (TOFU). Have a lot of qualified leads but they’re not converting as quickly as you want them to? You need middle of the funnel (MOFU) content to educate them and fuel their interest. Are they ready to buy? Make sure you have content ready to bring them across the line at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
- To publish content that drives traffic, you need a focused content strategy. A focused content strategy is one that helps you define a position. Stake out, claim and then defend a specific position in the market. Classic positioning strategy tells us that highly successful companies stake out a position in the marketplace that can be summed up in a few words or less. The classic examples in automotive are BMW (position: performance), Mercedes (position: engineering) and Volvo (safety). Microsoft does a host of things, and of course Apple does, too. But it was office software and the personal computer, respectively, that shot those companies to marketplace dominance. Your position is basically the thing you are known for. And it needs to be specific. Specificity means your content hammers on a recognized set of themes. The more specific you can keep your overall content, the more likely you are to stake out a clear position – and help to define your brand. Think of your position as that area or “walled garden” of your industry category that you want to be known for.
- Here are three examples of companies that use blogging effectively. Beyond blogging every day, which is a huge best practice, they offer lessons in the art of defining a position. LogMyCalls embarked on a fascinating experiment – they sought out to publish 150 blogs posts in 50 days. That’s 3 posts per day. And they got results. They doubled their site traffic – but more importantly, they saw a jump in the metrics that matter most, including a 4x increase in leads in a single quarter. When you look at LogMyCalls’ blog content, it is explicitly focused around how phone calls play a vital role in turning leads into customers. Their position? The importance of phone calls, or simply why you still need to use the phone to close a sale. It’s a counterintuitive position to take at a time when marketing folks like to talk about how the “cold call” is dead. The content from LogMyCalls, which provides call analytics software, turns this message on its head by showing that phone calls play a vitally important role in the sales and marketing process, even if that role is no longer at the front of the sales funnel. Copyblogger plays in a crowded space with lots of folks who like to talk about (what else) blogging and content marketing. They are a hugely successful source of online marketing advice, but they focus in one area within that larger niche – they talk about the mechanics of writing, or HOW to write good content, not just what content to write. Hubspot defined the very idea of “inbound marketing” by staking a claim to that term early and building a position around it by consistently blogging and publishing other content for years. The result? They just went public with an IPO.
- There is no substitute for creating high-quality content. You can’t just phone it in. If you are just trying to reach a minimum quota, or checking off a box that says you are doing blogging, chances are good that your blog will go nowhere. The first rule: HELP people by giving them the kind of information they are looking for, or help them solve a problem (how do you know what problems they have or what they are looking for? That’s why you do audience research). How can you add value to trending or even controversial subjects in your industry? What kinds of issues are your customers and prospects routinely encountering? Your point of view is vital to a group of people who could be your customers. Keep that in front of you at all times when you blog. DO NOT make your blog a catch-all for non-original content like news releases, media coverage and awards. That’s core promotional content that belongs elsewhere on your site.
- Vary up your blog posts with a variety of different formats and ways of presenting your expertise. Original commentary is the soul of your blog – your thoughts, advice and analysis are the main event. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use interviews and Q&A to interview folks inside and outside of your company. You can do “round up” posts of interesting events or stories from the Web. And anything you do in the way of videos, infographics or cheatsheets can be published on your blog.
- The best and most productive blogging is done by a team. At the very least, you need folks who can come together and brainstorm ideas and topics. At the inception level, a chief editor or project manager can make sure that everyone is on the same page with blogging, and manage the editorial calendar to keep everyone on track. What about your writers – who in your organization can contribute? Do you have an internal subject matter expert, and if so, how can you pull their expertise out of them and onto paper (or screen)? You may, like many successful business blogs, bring in outside resources and guest bloggers. A designer, or at least a person who knows their way around stock images or even Adobe Illustrator, can provide the all-important design elements, like photos, that the best blogs have. And then, when your post is ready, who’s going to optimize, publish and promote it?
- Frequency is absolutely vital. In the world of blogging, more is simply more. This chart is from Curata’s study of the top business bloggers. The correlation of frequency of publishing to page views is direct and clear. Hubspot also has published research showing that frequency of blogging impacts website traffic and the number of leads generated.
- If you build it, they’re not going to come unless you promote it. You need to put effort into distributing and promoting your blog content after going to all the trouble of writing and publishing it. The importance of getting your blog content out there via social channels cannot be overestimated. You need to post your blog content on all of the major social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) after you publish it. And once you publish a blog post, don’t forget about it. Promote it several times, especially via Twitter, with an “in case you missed it” (ICYMI) message. You can even go back and promote posts you published weeks or months ago – or longer, if the piece features especially rich and worthwhile content. Blog content done well can provide the cornerstone of a regular email newsletter, which every business should have, regardless of industry. Some businesses push out a newsletter whenever they publish a new blog post. Blog posts can also be recycled into contributed articles for trade media or guest posts for professional online news/blog outlets.
- Does your blog have Google Analytics installed? If not, get it. If you’re not sure, find out. Blog analytics are the first step to making sure that your blogging is doing what it’s supposed to be doing – namely, driving traffic and helping you acquire customers. Google Analytics will give you most of the initial set of metrics or benchmarks you need (that would be the stuff in “Traffic” and “Retention & Engagement” above), such as the posts that are garnering visitors, how much time visitors are spending with your blog content, and seeing how much engagement you are getting on your blog. Having this data will help you to determine the themes and topics that are resonating with readers, and help you to refine and plan your ongoing blog efforts. To track lead generation and sales, you will need to work with your sales team to chart how or if blog readers/visitors are turning into customers. Marketing technology platforms or CRM solutions like Hubspot, Marketo and a vast number of other platforms can provide an immense help in tracking, scoring and following up with blog-generated leads – but it’s wise to take this step only when you have a handle on producing quality content.
- Don’t let the structure of your blog be an afterthought. The platform of choice for creating and growing an optimized blog is WordPress. WordPress, the customized (not .com) version, gives business bloggers the ability to fully own and manage their content. It excels in two critical areas: 1) WordPress is itself a search-friendly platform, and provides tools and plugins that make optimizing content for search a lot easier. 2) Of no less importance is the fact that WordPress is user-friendly and accessible to just about anyone who can find their way around Word. This makes it an ideal publishing platform. There are other open source platforms like Drupal and Joomla, but they lack the size and fervor of the WordPress development community.