During his presentation at Content Marketing World today, Compendium CEO Chris Baggott stressed that companies need to consider establishing a blog as their hub for content development. What’s more, Chris also discussed how content marketers can mine for “hidden information” that can help them generate plenty of engaging and compelling content.
The benefits of business blogging:
Gives you the ability to be controversial
Improves how you show up in search results
Demonstrates thought leadership and that you care
Is linkable and shareable
Is a permanent repository for social media content
Facilitates reimagining of content
A blog can act as a central hub for content from across the company. In a lot of organizations, people don’t talk to each other. The email team doesn’t speak to PR who doesn’t talk to the SEO people, etc. A blog can cover all the bases—almost every piece of content is blog-worthy, so accumulate and distribute it that way.
You need the ability to moderate content and review it before it goes live, but don’t crush the soul of the content or those who contribute.
Influencers should be part of your marketing plan
Think about customers who are influencers who can share your content. Even people with small circles of contacts have an impact, when you multiply the number of people who share your content. Everybody is influential to someone. Consider the Dunbar circle—we all max out at about 150 relationships. When customers blog or post to Facebook they are broadcasting their lives to their sphere of influence. Why not take advantage of their goodwill about your company, of their stories?
When you ask customers to talk about themselves you get amazing stories.
Where to look for content
Here are places where you can find content:
Email: People often do what you ask, so email links to a customer review site, ask questions about why they bought a particular product. That generates a lot of content. Consider geotagging to make things local and relevant to both the current customer and the prospect.
Outbound email: Look at customer service emails that answer questions and address customer needs or concerns, and put this information into your blog (stripped of identifying info). You can even put the blog address as a BCC in the reply to be held for review and moderation before posting.
Customer reviews: Add things like forms and tabs and links on Facebook since that content is not saved or archived once it flows off your page.
Survey responses: Feed into the blog like customer service emails.
Social media: Feed social media content back to the blog.
Employees: Let your employees blog. You let them talk to the customer face-to-face, so let them blog, too. Just set up a few simple rules about things like not talking about competitors and a quick review by a moderator.
Stories from the front lines: Make it easy for them to submit
FAQs
Business blogs don’t get a lot of comments or even a lot of readers. However, 80-90% of all blog traffic comes from first time visitors to your blog. These are your prospects. We are writing blogs like we are journalists, like we are writing for the people we wrote for yesterday. That isn’t true—most of your readers just woke up this morning and didn’t know or suspect they’d be visiting your blog today. To that end, make sure to include calls to action in your blog posts!
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