Business blogging pays off

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BlogNot sure whether it’s worth your time to create and maintain a blog for your business? HubSpot’s latest survey on inbound marketing answers that question with a resounding YES.

The survey highlights the fact that blogging is a remarkably effective means of inbound marketing:

“Seventy-nine percent of companies who have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing this year, compared with just 20% of those companies that do not have a blog.” [HubSpot 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report]

But blogging requires time and persistence

Business blogging delivers inbound leads for remarkably little capital investment. Frequency makes blogging even more valuable. In the HubSpot survey, the 82% of companies that blog daily report an ROI for their inbound efforts, compared with 57% of those who blog monthly.

Yet keeping a blog ‘fed’ regularly can be a big challenge for companies of any size. (I struggle myself finding time for this blog.) If you want to commit to consistent business blogging, here are a few strategies that might help.

  • Start by building an editorial calendar around your SEO keywords or search objectives, and brainstorm ways to fill those topics.
  • Integrate blogs with other content initiatives. Some of my clients now ask me to prepare a blog posting with every new customer story or white paper I create for them. Have a new video? There’s a blog in that. Make blogging part of all new content development.
  • Share the love. Enlist multiple people to contribute to your blog, each with their own subject matter concentration.
  • Use ghost-bloggers. If you have a visionary executive who doesn’t have the time or inclination to blog, have a writer talk with them and put together blog postings from the conversations. Or create a blog in an interview format to pull content from a reticent contributor.
  • Look beyond writing. A blog can be an infographic, a quote, a video or some photos. Just be sure to include your search keywords in accompanying captions, labels or headlines.
  • Invite guests. Perhaps a valued customer, partner or analyst would like to write a guest post. It doesn’t always have to be your own employees.
  • Always consider what the customer wants to read. Answer common questions. Respond to concerns or criticism. Give people a reason to check your blog.

On a side note…

If you want to look at a company that practices what it preaches when it comes to inbound marketing, look at HubSpot. This report is a classic example of an effective content marketing and inbound marketing strategy: generate useful, relevant and valuable research for your target market and share it freely.

You can download the report from http://offers.hubspot.com/2013-state-of-inbound-marketing.

Curating research as a content strategy

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My last blog on research as a content strategy talked about the many content marketing benefits of creating original research. But what if you don’t have the time or resources to create or commission original research? Research may still have a role to play in your content strategy.

If you can’t create, curate. 

Research can be an important part of a ‘content curation’ strategy, in which you collect relevant and interesting content for your followers or customers.

Remember that your own reputation is on the line. Only use research that is relevant and from a legitimate or trusted source. Then make sure you have permission to use it and are attributing it correctly.

If you choose wisely, the research can help support your position as a go-to resource for your prospects and potentially build relationships with the providers of the research.

Research as a content strategy

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iStock_000019076382XSmall ResearchIf you’re pursuing a ‘thought leadership’ strategy and want to make some noise, consider adding original research to your content marketing strategy.

Got data?

The key is coming up with good original research.

Look through your own data sources. You may be able to find emerging trends in the course of doing business with your customers or buried in your ‘big data.’ One of my clients, ThreatMetrix, publishes threat trends discovered in its global threat network.

Commission a survey.  Another option is to commission research into your market or prospects from a third party research organization.  You gain the credibility of the researching organization while retaining the ability to control the overall topic and direction of the research.

Conduct your own research.  I’d suggest hiring someone with market research expertise to guide you, and be careful about making claims if there isn’t statistical significance.  But if your budget is tight and your aim a little lower, even a good online survey can provide a little insight.

Original research may take an upfront investment, but it can have a big payoff.

Research has content marketing ‘legs’

There are so many ways to use and re-use original research.

  • Publish the research in a report – you could put the full report behind a registration form to use it for lead generation
  • Get media coverage with press releases about key findings
  • Create a webinar presenting your key findings (again, good for lead generation)
  • Post a video of someone talking through the key points on your website or a video sharing site
  • Spin off multiple blogs on specific aspects of the research
  • Develop infographics from the research

The extra bonus? The research can guide your marketing efforts as well. The more informed you are about prospects’ concerns or market trends, the more responsive you can be.

Social media in marketing: A work in progress

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Are we getting any smarter about using social media in marketing?  Not according to Duke’s most recent CMO survey.

The Duke CMO Survey

Twice a year, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business conducts a survey of Chief Marketing Officers. What makes the CMO survey so interesting is the fact that you can track how things change over the course of the time between surveys.

According to the most recent survey, both B2B and B2C CMOs plan to increase spending on social media – more than doubling the percentage of the marketing budget spent on social media in the next five years.

Screen Shot 2013-03-10 at 2.33.23 PM

[Source: The CMO Survey, cmosurvey.org, February 2013, Highlights and Insights, Figure 5.1]

Social media is still isolated in many marketing strategies

When asked how well social media is integrated with the marketing strategy – on a scale of 1 to 7 – the average response is 3.8.  And that average has stayed the same over the last several surveys, since February 2011.

We’re increasing our social media spending, but not really integrating those efforts with overall marketing strategy.

Note that the respondents self-evaluate their own marketing organizations as being quite strong. In a Lake Woebegon way, everyone is above average.  The lack of integration is not seen as dysfunction so much as just a fact of doing business.

We’re not really measuring our marketing efforts

We’re also not making very good use of marketing analytics. Respondents report that only about 30% of the projects are influenced by marketing analytics.  It’s understandably difficult to get a good handle on what’s happening across all channels in today’s fast-moving marketing world.

Social media and content marketing

Like Mark Twain, I’m always tread with care around statistical claims. (“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”)  But in this case, I think the study illustrates how marketing as a discipline has had to adopt to significant changes in recent years. In many ways we’re still catching up.

My personal sense is content marketing is one way that marketing organizations will integrate social media into the broader marketing strategy. Social media is one channel by which companies can engage in content marketing – both listening to what customers are saying and putting relevant information where customers gather.

A Facebook community or Twitter presence, for example, can go from isolated outpost to important listening post if you provide useful content based on requests and solicit feedback, covering the issues and questions that are most pressing to your prospects and customers.

You can peruse the results yourself at http://cmosurvey.org, or read the blog post on Forbes by Christine Moorman, Director of the CMO Survey.

A must-read for marketers: To Sell is Human

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SalesmanDo you feel uncomfortable when someone ‘confuses’ marketing with sales?

Reading Daniel Pink’s new book To Sell is Human might change your mind. According to Pink, teachers, physicians, entrepreneurs and others are all in the business of selling. My only worry is that our conditioned aversion to the idea of sales will prevent more people from reading the book.

The book’s premise is that most of us are in sales if we spend a significant part of our time trying to persuade people to part with resources (whether money, time, behavior change or attention).  It includes a wealth of insights and practices to be more persuasive. In his usual method, Pink backs everything up with interesting anecdotes and relevant research, so it’s a fun read as well.

Many of the techniques and recommendations are appropriate for one-on-one situations. As marketers, we sell to entire market segments rather than individuals – which is why using buyer personas can be helpful.  But the fundamental principles of sales apply even when you’re talking to a market segment.

For example, Pink writes about ‘attunement’ being one of the first principles of sales success in today’s environment.  Attunement means bringing your actions into harmony with your buyer’s perspective.  This is a core idea behind content marketing.

He also discusses six successors to the elevator pitch – I plan to try them all. The question pitch highlights the power of questions when used correctly.  And I can hardly wait to try writing a ‘Pixar’ pitch for one of my clients.

There’s a lot to gain from this book – both on a business and professional level. I will take some time to process and revisit it. In the mean time, I’d suggest you add it to your reading list for 2013.

 

Are rogue emails sabotaging your marketing?

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I was on the receiving end of a rogue email drip campaign recently.  The first email (which I ignored) offered a product demo.  Then came the second and third – and that’s when I was sure these were rogue emails.

Rogue sales emails are a marketing person’s nightmare.  They’re the emails that someone (usually in sales) sends out to prospects without checking with marketing.  There are several types of rogue emails:

  • Frankenstein emails – patched together from other emails, creating a less-than-lovely result
  • Zombie emails – no matter how hard marketing tries to kill them, they just keep reappearing

Why do I suspect it was a rogue campaign, not one blessed by marketing?

Symptom #1 – Bad grammar/spelling

One of the emails had a major grammatical error, as well as several other smaller issues that might slip by someone who wasn’t an English major:

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Symptom #2- Off-target messaging

The second email never mentioned what the product actually did.  The third, which was starting to feel like a harangue, had a ‘value proposition’ that I’m sure would make the company’s marketing department cringe:

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Ah, the most features at the lowest price point.  Good to know – if only you’d told me what the product did.

How rogue emails hurt your business

I suspect that these emails were sent from a well-meaning salesperson.  You could argue that if I wasn’t the prospect for the business, then there’s no harm done, right?

Wrong.

  • From a branding perspective, off-message and error-filled emails can degrade your reputation.  If you cannot find and fix typos, what kind of effort do you put into testing your software?
  • From an email deliverability perspective, rogue emails can do lasting damage. Every time a recipient identifies one of these emails as spam, it hurts your company’s sender reputation. This means that future emails from your company are less likely to reach recipients’ inboxes.

How does marketing stop rogue emails?

I wish I knew – but here are some tactics that might work:

  • Give sales a wide range of proofed and appropriate emails templates to work with.
  • If a salesperson thinks they have a great idea for an email, listen to their suggestions and offer to do A/B testing on open rates and click-throughs. Maybe they really do have a great idea.
  • Make sure they understand the ramifications for everyone if the recipient marks the message as spam.
  • As a good business practice, insist that someone proof the emails before they are sent out.

Update: Rogue emails and spam

A friend sent me a link to a blog containing what may be the very first spam email ever –  sent by a rogue marketer for DEC. Marketing has to bear the blame for this one. In addition to being the first spam, it had the unique distinction of overwhelming the “to” address capabilities of mailers at that time and of being in ALL CAPS.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

Anyone can do marketing, right?

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wonkamemeToday’s topic is almost the opposite of the last one (How do I get developers to blog). It’s what to do with the engineer (or other technical expert) who thinks that because marketing is a ‘soft’ skill that they can surely do it better in the 10 minutes they’re having a morning coffee than the marketing department.

It’s a pervasive problem in technology start-ups. Someone who will remain nameless (to protect her identity) was complaining to me recently about an engineer who constantly belittled a very effective marketing team.

Then there was the Crowded Ocean blog post only this morning on “How to avoid bad clients.” They suggest telling the client who won’t hand off the marketing reins something like: “…no problem if you want to jump in and tell your designers (or writers or SEO experts) how to do their job—just let us know when you want them to come in and code the product.”

I’ve also met people who at first felt no need for hiring a writer, because, as they say, “I can write a 50-page white paper in an evening.” Great, but 50 pages is almost never a target length for lead generation paper.

There are more subtle cases of this mindset:

  • Engineers who assume that they are the target personas, hence everything in marketing must sound like it came from them
  • Startups that decide to save money on marketing by having the engineers write all of the sales collateral
  • Startups that try to save money by having the engineers write the website.  It’s easy to spot these companies.

How do you handle unwelcome marketing interference:
There are several different strategies you can employ:

Repurpose – If you’ve got someone who likes to write, terrific. Take their 50-page paper and repurpose it into several blog posts, videos, solution notes, etc. Their efforts will be ‘heard’ without being the voice of the company.

Re-orient –Introduce them to your organization’s buyer personas. (You do have personas, right?) Help them understand that their perspective is just one of many you must address.

Research – Talk to them about some of the research behind marketing, such as eye-tracking studies, SEO strategies and cognitive learning. Perform A/B testing where possible. (This is also a great way to demonstrate if their Adwords ad copy is horrible.) If you let them know that there is some science and research behind what you do, many developers will at least give marketing a little more respect.

The best long-term strategy is to earn the respect of these people. This can take time and patience. If that’s not possible, just filter what’s valuable from their suggestions and ignore the rest.