When going up against larger competitors, one factor midsized firms struggle to overcome is the difference in marketing budgets. Fortunately, the Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to garnering exposure and building brand awareness, affinity and trust. One way to leverage the Internet is through the use of a business blog that employees contribute to regularly. Although larger companies can potentially throw more people and money at content marketing, it's content quality, rather than quantity, that wins the day. In fact, quantity becomes a disadvantage when a blog publishes low-quality posts; readers eventually tune out the brand. This controllable factor gives midsized firms a fighting chance at attracting eyeballs just as well as, and possibly even better than, the big guys.
Such an undertaking, however, must be done properly. Although building a blog on the company website is easy and quick, creating a steady stream of interesting and useful content that keeps the firm regularly at the top of customers' minds is more involved. With some preparation, structure and oversight, a business blog can hit the desired goals for advancing brand awareness, reputation and revenue.
Where Inbound and Outbound Meet
When done right, content, or "inbound," marketing works well versus disruptive, or "outbound," marketing because it is essentially a free product your firm offers. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, involves ripe channels for maximizing content marketing's effect. Consider this: If an email touts a company post that will help recipients in their work or personal lives, they will likely click through and give it a chance. And if you deliver on their expectations, recipients will become more amenable not only to future emails, but also to seeking out your content on their own. This will happen all year long and not just when they might make a purchase.
Here are a few things to consider when creating a company blog:
- Determine target audiences and the content that will attract them. The general rule for business blogs? They should most often address the problems, issues and questions encountered by people who use the firm's products or services, and they should do it in a way that is educational, and even neighborly, rather than overtly promotional. Combined with a keyword-search feature, a blog can replace the FAQ section on a company website while adding personality. Blogs can also discuss new data or developments in your industry, or a related industry, along with analyses of why these breakthroughs are important to customers or to how the company serves its clients. If the firm's employees are also consumers, they can write about personal experiences they've had to show that they value knowledgeable and respectful customer interactions. Corporate-responsibility efforts are also a good topic to garner publicity.
- Involve all departments in the blogging effort. If sales and marketing personnel are the only ones creating content, the topics and tone will become stale over time and readership will decline steadily. Identify people in each department who would be adept at writing useful articles of 300 to 500 words in length, and who can learn and fluidly integrate the SEO keywords the company uses most often. Holding quarterly contests that reward the blogger who draws the most views will help generate compelling content. In addition, the firm should require all other department members to provide a minimum number of possible blog topics to those writers each year, and also ask everyone to promote the blog content via their social media channels. This will give customers, prospects, the public and media outlets a fuller understanding of your company's collective intelligence, and it will help your own employees learn more about their organization and colleagues.
- Have an editor work with your bloggers. This is an important step in avoiding legal or public-relations problems and maintaining brand-voice consistency. Remember that most employees' core competency is not creating tight, focused, entertaining messages that contain perfect grammar. Before any blog post goes live, someone in the firm with proven communication abilities must read it. That person should avoid being too heavy-handed while editing and not seek to sanitize each post. Doing so would not only make the blog posts less credible and effective among readers, but it would also demotivate the employees who write them.
How much time must employees devote to blogging in order for the firm to see tangible benefits? Not much, actually. A HubSpot survey found that 72 percent of companies that posted one blog entry per week acquired at least one customer through it over the course of a year. At a midsized company, one post each quarter by just a few employees is likely to draw several new customers.
Has your company implemented an employee writing or blogging program? How have you incentivized contributions? Let us know by commenting below.
Rob Carey is an NCMM contributor and a features writer who has focused on the business-to-business niche since 1992. He spent his first 15 years at Nielsen Business Media, rising from editorial intern to editorial director. Since then, he has been the principal of New York-based Meetings & Hospitality Insight, working with large hospitality brands in addition to various media outlets.