Taking the "Blah" out of Blogging
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Blogs have graduated from “nice to have” to “must haves” for marketers. But is blogging a good fit for your business? What will you blog about? How often? How can you incorporate guest blogs and internal bloggers without losing quality control? Most importantly, how can you avoid creating another boring company blog? This webinar will cover the pros and cons of marketing blogs, as well as strategic best practices for keeping your blog not only up-and-running, but producing engagement and ROI. Don’t miss this session with Marketo’s Maggie Jones, who will help you discover: • Why your business should have a blog • Writing and editing best practices • How to build an internal blogging program • Much more!
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Taking the "Blah" out of Blogging
- 1. Taking the “Blah” out of Blogging
- 7. Stephanie Schwab’s “Finding Your Brand Voice” chart:
- 8. • Align your writers. • Extend the review process. • Keep an editorial calendar. (More on that one later)
- 9. #2: Find your writers
- 10. • Incentivize internal bloggers. • Offer your editing services. • Reach out to partners, customers, and thought leaders.
- 11. #3: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
- 12. • Set a cadence, and keep it. • Schedule posts ahead of time. • Meet regularly with stakeholders to discuss guidelines.
- 13. #4: Find your sweet spot.
- 14. What you know about What your audience cares about
- 15. • If you must be promotional, use the 411 rule. • Pay attention to the comments. • Share what you know.
- 16. #5: Create an Editorial Calendar
- 17. • Get important events, announcements, etc. on the calendar ahead of time. • Align with PR, social, content, and product. • Spread out the feasts and famines.
- 19. • Top-funnel/ “Vanity” metrics • First-Touch and Multi-Touch attribution • Continually re-calibrate
- 20. RECAP: 1) Find your voice 2) Find your writers 3) Chew your food 4) Stay in your sweet spot 5) Keep a calendar 6) Test and recalibrate
- 21. Any questions ?
Editor's Notes
- Today, it seems like everybody and their dog has a company blog, but that doesn’t mean you need one.
- But unfortunately, so many company blogs feel like this to your customers.
- Instead of this.
- Stephanie Schwab of Social Media Explorer breaks down a brand’s voice into four categories: Character/Persona, Tone, Language, and Purpose. Here’s her list of attributes for each category – which of these descriptors belong to your brand?
- Align your writers. Make sure anyone writing for your brand (whether it’s advertising, press releases, ebooks, or blog posts) is closely aligned – often, this content is all written by the same person. If these functions are handled by multiple people, meet regularly to review and improve. Extend the review process. At the end of each day, our social team sends their scheduled tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn posts to a cross-functional team of reviewers. This way, members of our PR, demand generation, content, SEO, and PPC teams all have a chance to weigh in. (This is also a great way to catch typos and bad links!) Keep an editorial calendar. A calendar isn’t just for planning out your future social posts – it’s also for recording your posts from the past. It isn’t easy keeping track of which ebook you’ve already tweeted, or which event you’ve already advertised on LinkedIn, especially if you have multiple people on your team.
- One of the golden rules of blogging is “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.” If you update your blog inconsistently, your audience won’t know when to expect new content, and they’ll inevitably feel frustrated when you haven’t added anything new.
- by finding a niche topic that your audience really cares about (and YOU really know about) and speaking to that. What is everyone in your audience looking for? What are the questions your company gets asked over and over again? The great thing about this kind of evergreen content is that it doesn’t have to be product oriented – in fact, product oriented content is rarely evergreen, because your products are probably changing and developing all of the time. This is where helpful, educational content comes in.
- Of course, some weeks you’ll have a dozen things to write about; other weeks you’ll have none. Creating an editorial calendar for your blog will help you maintain a consistent cadence. If you have more material than usual, you can just pop it on next week’s calendar. And if you notice that you only have a few posts for the coming week, you can gather some new material with time to spare. A calendar also helps you map time-sensitive content ahead of time. We keep our content, social, and PR teams closely aligned, so that blog posts containing new announcements, releases, or awesome new content assets are firmly on the calendar weeks in advance. At the end of each week, we send around the blog topics for the following week – this way, any “last minute” changes aren’t actually at the last minute.