Blog
Tomorrow is the first day of spring, and - boy! - are we ever ready.
Like the crocuses bursting up through the ground, our fellow marketers are a-bloom with great ideas, commentary, and conversations. This week's wrap-up includes finding the right people on twitter, raising customer intimacy (racy!), and improving your business blogging skills by partying (no, really!).
TGIF & enjoy the great reads.
See you next week!
Social Media and Thought Leadership: The Virtuous Circle for B2B Marketing - by @robleavitt
Rob points out that B2B marketers are taking a dangerously limited view of the intersection of thought leadership and social media.
Marketing Content Must Reach Beyond Two-Way Dialogue - by @ardath421 via @sysconmedia
Ardath Albee explains why B2B content needs to work overtime to address the needs of all involved in today's complex buying process.
Social Media Raises the Bar for Customer Intimacy - by @ckochster
Chris Koch suggests that the marriage of content and social media can take interactions with B2B prospects and customers to a new level.
The Surprising Old-School Secret to Blogging Success - by @soniasimone on @copyblogger
This tongue-in-cheek post counsels bloggers to dabble in some unplugged communication tactics like conversation (the real, 1.0 kind!) and parties. That's advice I like to hear!
A 3-minute Lesson in Traditional Versus Social Brand Marketing - by @markwschaefer
We love Mark W. Schaefer's blog {grow} for it's insightful commentary and scintillating reader conversations (I love an excuse to use the word "scintillating"), but this post is partly just for fun. It features a great little agency promo that trys to cleverly illustrate the differences between the "good, ol' days" and the Web 2.0/3.0 that we're living in now.
A Glimpse Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer - by @ConnectMarketer
The number of B2B buyers using social media to help them make a purchase decision is on the rise. Great report & data.
The Brand Dashboard - a Window to Relevance - by @briansolis
Brian Solis highlights some free social media listening tools and how you can use them to business advantage.
SXSW - Austin: The Heart of the Content Revolution - by @magnify via @huffingtonpost
Of course we've been reading a lot about SXSW this week. I especially liked this post from Steve Rosenbaum about the importance of content strategy.
How to Find the Right People on Twitter - by @mattmcgee via @sengineland
Are you looking for new people to connect with on Twitter? This post from Search Engine Land provides lots of great tools and sites.
Blogging is hard work. You must consistently create and publish great content. Today's post is about saving yourself time and stress by implementing a simple editorial calendar. Sure, it's going to require a little work up front, but - trust me - you'll thank me once you're up and running.
The Editorial Calendar - what is it?
In case you're not sure, an editorial calendar is a content plan that is laid over a publishing schedule. Magazines, for instance, have monthly editorial calendars that start out as a broad list of key topics and eventually evolve into highly detailed outlines of each issue's content.
How do I create one?
I'm an Excel junkie, so I tend to go old school when setting up an editorial calendar. For collaborative projects, however, I find google docs to be very helpful. The "living" nature of a google doc means you never have to worry about version control. Sweet.
My typical calendar has at least three worksheet tabs:
- Calendar - Laid out to reflect all my publication dates, this tab gives me a place to schedule each post.
- Pending - This is where I capture all (and I do mean all) the ideas I have for posts.
- Published - This is an archive of everything I've published. (Yes, I know this is automatically generated in most blogging platforms, but I do have a reason for duplicating the effort.)
Optional tabs:
- Guests - If the blog plan includes ingoing and/or outgoing guest posts, I like to track those works-in-progress separately from my core content.
- Open Items - Although it can certainly be a separate document, I like to roll my "punch list" of blog upgrade and maintenance items into my editorial calendar.
Here is an Blog Editorial Calendar Template (Excel) that you can use to get started.
Once you've got the framework set up, you're ready to put it to work:
Capture Ideas
Have you ever had a genius idea for a post while standing in the shower, and then - five minutes later as you're toweling off - completely forgotten what it was? Painful. Tragic. Unnecessary. One of the primary rules of blogging: write ALL your post ideas down. Pen and notepad (or smartphone) should accompany you everywhere (or, in the case of a shower situation, at least be close by). Step two - transfer your great ideas to the "Pending" worksheet in your editorial calendar for future inspiration.
Create Your Publishing Plan
Does your content lend itself to monthly themes? Do you have a seasonal sales cycle that will influence the types of topics you cover at various times of the year? Do you need to create specific content for people at different stages in the buying process? The criteria that are important to your business are the criteria you should consider when developing your broad brushstroke publishing plan. You should identify how frequently you'll post, on which days of the week, whether you'll have recurring "columns" or more freeform content. Nothing is written in stone, but it's good to start with some kind of plan.
Schedule Content
Now it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty business of filling in those publishing "slots" with specific topics. You can schedule posts out for a week at a time, or six months - whatever makes you comfortable. It's kind of like a puzzle - your ideas are the pieces and your publishing plan is the picture you're trying to create.
So, what's the payoff for all your hard work?
Reduce Writer's Block
It's 9:40AM and your post is supposed to go live at 10. You have no idea what to write. Panic sets in. With the editorial calendar, you may never face this terrifying situation again. Whether you go with the topic that's scheduled, or switch it up and pull something from the pending list, you will always have a list of ready-made topics to choose from.
Identify Opportunities
Laying your blog's content plan out in an organized way helps you to see and create useful patterns. For instance, you might decide to run a series of posts that correspond to some of the questions most frequently asked by prospects and then package them up in an aggregate post that you can include in your most popular posts list. By planning ahead, you can also identify (and have time to execute) opportunities for relevant guest posts, event-based content, and other collaborative efforts.
Track Engagement
There are literally dozens of ways to track different Web and blog stats, but I like to aggregate some key stats into my editorial calendar on the Published tab. If you do it on a regular basis, it only takes a few minutes and will make later analysis much more impactful. For instance, you might track the following for each post: pub date, title, topic, #/comments, #/tweets, #/facebook shares, #/trackbacks.
Optimize Your Strategy
Once you have a baseline strategy and plan, and you've dutifully collected stats on your post performance, you have everything you need to do a bang-up analysis of what's been working and what's been falling short. Look at the trends and the patterns behind those trends. Is engagement driven by topic, day of the week, tone, type of content? These simple stats can provide valuable insights that will inform a stronger, more successful content plan and editorial calendar.
With all that said, it's important to remember that real life may cause you to change things up at the last minute. Whether your plans are changed because you've become uninspired by a particular topic, or because you've become wildly inspired to write about another, always give yourself the flexibility to go with your gut. Having a plan can help you be more strategic and reduce the stress you feel when it comes time to churn out brilliant content, but sometimes winging it has merit too.
What works (and what doesn't) for you when it comes to wrangling your blog content?
About the Author: Jamie is a freelance consultant and copywriter who partners with small businesses, start-ups, and creative professionals to define and market their brands. Her specialties include brand development, social media strategy, and content marketing. Enjoy more of her posts, or drop her an email.
Related Posts
78 Questions to Ask Before Launching a Blog
One of the things I mention time and time again is that you needs to be able to articulate how your company is unique - why would someone want to do business with you? While this is something that is challenging in any industry, it's a particularly daunting task when you are selling your services instead of a product where there are not tangible things to compare. It's easy to fall into the trap of saying things like, "I'm experienced" and "I'll get the job done." Yawn.
I recently had the pleasure of working with Dianna Huff, a B2B Website Marketing Consultant, to update some of the content on her website, including her "How I'm Different" page. If you know Dianna, you know that she has extensive experience and a boatload of happy clients; just one conversation with her, and you can see why her services are in such high demand.
But, even then, under the best of circumstances, pulling together the "How I'm Different" page is not a straightforward task. If you have ever struggled to differentiate yourself or your client, here are some tips.
Listen -- really listen -- to all feedback from customers and prospects
Really listen to what your prospective and current clients are telling you. Are there things that they praise you for? Or do they seem surprised when you share some information with them? These are the things you want to highlight. Dianna was great about sending me anecdotes about conversations she had with prospective clients or customers about why they were working with her, which gave me a lot of ideas for the page.
For instance, Dianna edited the bestseller, Inbound Marketing - a job she got from a recommendation from David Meerman Scott. She mentioned that a few people she talked to had brought this up and were really impressed (I know I was), so I knew this unique experience was something I had to incorporate on the page.
Look beyond the website
As part of the writing process, I read Dianna's website thoroughly. I also checked out things like her LinkedIn profile, her newsletter and her blog to get ideas. I constantly found myself referencing this information to make her message stronger.
Consider the competition
I always ask clients for their primary competitors. I don't want to copy what they are doing, but I like to see how others are positioning themselves to get a sense of what prospects see when they are searching for information about your type of service.
Think about what matters to your audience
There may be a lot of things that you do well, but you need to couch them in the perspective of your audience. For instance, I analyzed all of Dianna's recommendations on LinkedIn to see which qualities mattered and impressed her audience most. In the case of Dianna's website, I wanted her "How I'm Different" page to establish her credibility and show how easy she is to work with.
Be as specific as possible
The last thing you want to do to differentiate yourself is to use gobbledygook such as "Industry-leading" and "innovative". Rather, you need to be very explicit as to how you are different. Looking at Dianna's page, she could have simply stated that she is experienced. But, rather, she highlights specific things such as the fact that she has been in business since 1998, she has served over 90 clients and has produced award-winning work. Those types of details are far more powerful.
Make sure this page is consistent with your messaging
Think about the message your website is trying to communicate about your business. An effective "How We're Different" page will tie all of these pieces together. Dianna was re-branding herself as a B2B Website Marketing Consultant, so this was a key point I highlighted on the page.
Get an outside perspective
Oftentimes, it's difficult to know what makes you unique or to say it in a way that makes you stand out. Getting an outside perspective can really help give you a new perspective. This is true for anyone selling a product or a service, but it's an observation that may not be obvious to those of us who do marketing and writing for a living - we think we should be able to figure it out on our own.
Dianna remarked to me multiple times that this wasn't an approach she would have taken - but she loves it. As I have also personally experienced, I have a much easier time giving clients advice than being objective about my own business.
What other tips do you have to help articulate a company's unique place in the market?
Related posts:
- Is Your B2B Website InspiringTrust?
- What to Consider Before Your Web Site Launch or Redesign
- How to Make Your Website More Buyer-Centric
About the author: Michele Linn is a B2B content strategist who helps companies create content and think through how their B2B prospects will consume it (from registration to promotion). You can follow her on Twitter or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B.
We're pleased to present a guest post by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and author of Digital Body Language, who shares his thoughts on where communication is headed -- and how marketers can prepare.
Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.
One-to-one
The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face-to-face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.
Broadcast
The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, and television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.
The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.
Social Media
Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.
Conversation Discovery
As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. This finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media without the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social content.
Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it. Here are five things you can do to get ready:
1) Get Familiar with Buzz: Watch what the major search engines are doing to aggregate and understand social media activity. Google Buzz is one of the first, but Bing is likely not far behind. Closely watch the “recommended” buzz function to see how accurately it is capturing what you are interested in.
2) Understand the Influencers in your Market: Not just the major press and analyst influencers, but the bloggers and smaller influencers in the space who will most likely cause your message to be “discovered” if they join the conversation. Engage and encourage your entire team in building strong relationships with influencers.
3) Create an “Information Concierge” Role: Ensure that the high-quality information you have finds its way into the conversations in the first place. You can do so by identifying related conversations, and presenting your information, via an information concierge, in the context of those conversations.
4) Be Findable: Understand, and continually improve, how “discoverable” your content is with natural search queries. Not only will this ensure a discipline of search-friendly practices, but it will guide your company culture towards one that thrives on the continuous creation of great content.
5) Watch the Search Majors: As Google deepens its investment in display advertising, and Bing makes similar moves, their ability to target “discovered” conversations will continually increase. Being aware of, and on top of, these investments will ensure you are well positioned to take advantage of them.
About the author: Steven Woods is CTO of Eloqua, the leading marketing automation software platform. Steven also wrote the book Digital Body Language, which explores how to understand customer intentions based on their online behaviour.
Buying cycles are longer than ever. A greater number of stakeholders are involved in the purchase decision. And prospects often bypass interaction with your company until late in the buying process. As a B2B marketer, how do you help your organization succeed in this new environment?
You may be incorporating marketing automation solutions and the concept of inbound marketing into the marketing mix. But the effectiveness of this approach is limited unless you make content marketing a critical element of your strategy.
In their book Get Content. Get Customers., Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett define content marketing as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
And those marketers who can deliver on this promise stand much to gain. According to recent research by IDG Network, B2B buyers only find relevant content 42% of the time. On the other, 66% of respondents in a recent study by DemandGen Report and Genius.com indicated the “consistent and relevant communication provided by both the sales and marketing organizations was a key influence in choosing that company as their solution provider".
While that may be true, it can be daunting to figure out the steps needed to create and deliver the content your prospects want. On March 24th, I will be presenting practical strategies to help you make the concept of content marketing a reality at the B2B Content Marketing Summit in Newton, MA.
The half-day event will also feature presentations from Derek Edmond of KoMarketing Associates and Patrick Cahill of Rally Point Webinars, in coordination with Dave Crouch of Ten24. Please join us to learn how to:
- Create content that engages prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle
- Market content through SEO and social media
- Reach new prospects through content-rich online events
We look forward to sharing insights and best practices you can put to immediate use. For more information and to register for the event, please check out the Learn24 Web site.
Hope to see you there!
About the author: Stephanie Tilton is a content-marketing consultant who helps B2B companies craft content that nurtures leads and advances the buying cycle. You can follow her on Twitter or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B.
