Marketing Trenches

For those of you reading this as an isolated post, fear not. Let’s get you caught up. This is the 5th in a series of posts designed to help B2B marketers design an effective B2B lead generation strategy. Here’s what we’ve covered thusfar:

B2B Lead Generation Step #1: Start with the Right Mindset
B2B Lead Generation Step #2: Build a Strong Roster of Stakeholders
B2B Lead Generation Step #3: Identify the Metrics that Matter
B2B Lead Generation Step #4: Revisit, Refine and Simplify Your Core Message

If you followed step 4 and your messaging is now in good shape, the next step should seem very natural. Regardless of the type of lead generation programs you are going to execute, you will inevitably need content. If you are running a content-free lead generation program, you’re likely an advertiser - not a marketer. That’s ok, but this series may not provide a lot of value for you.

While taking a content inventory and prioritizing content holes may seem like a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be. I am going to give you a very simple method of attacking this step.

First, I need to make a significant assumption. I need to assume that you have some sense - be it broad or specific - of who your buyers are and the types of content they prefer. These profiles are often called buyer personas, and you should have one for your decision makers, your influencers, and your users. If you were scratching your head as you read the last couple of sentences, take a step back and think about how your current customers fit into these profiles.

Let’s start with taking an inventory of your content, and remember we’re going to keep it simple. Spend at least a half day (often more) and do the following:

1) Collect every single piece of marketing content that exists within your organization.

2) Create a spreadsheet listing each piece of content.

3) Create three columns next to the list of content pieces:

• Platform(s)

• Keep, Revise or Replace

• Optimized?

4) Review each piece of content, completing those three columns as follows:

• Platform(s): Represents the residence(s) of the content. Where does it live currently?

• Keep, Revise or Replace: Exactly what it sounds like. Don’t obsess over this, you ought to know the answer after a few minutes of scanning.

• Optimized?: This may be a tough one if you don’t understand SEO. Any piece of content that resides on the web should be optimized for search. If you don’t know what that means, get someone involved that does.

5) Create a 5th column. I usually call it “Work?” and accept only yes or no inputs. This column indicates whether you have to do anything to address that particular piece of content, and the answer comes from these simple rules:

• If the content is not placed in all appropriate platforms, and/or it is classified as revise or replace, and/or it is not optimized, then the answer is yes, it requires work.

• If the content is placed in all appropriate platforms, and it is listed as keep, and it is optimized, then the answer is no, it does not require work.

You now know what you have, and what requires work. Our next step is to identify and prioritize the don’t haves.

About the Author: Mike Sweeney is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing. Don’t hesitate to drop Mike a comment on this post. Follow Mike on Twitter for more marketing commentary.

In last week’s post, A Welcome Audit During Tax Season: How to Evaluate Your Marketing Tactics we discussed the first step in making sure you are taking maximum advantage of your online opportunities.  Coming out of this first step you should now have a sense of everything you are doing online, your strengths and potential areas for improvement.  And hopefully you have now put this together into your interactive marketing plan.

This week, we’ll cover Step 2, which focuses on implementing that plan, and in particular,  the places where things most often go wrong.  And, just for fun, let’s number them out McLaughlin Group (I’ll let you do the McLaughlin voice)

Issue Number 1: The Plan Isn’t Right, or There’s No Plan at All

OK, counting this as one isn’t entirely fair.   If you read and followed our Step 1, evaluated everything properly, and created an Interactive Marketing plan that integrates with your overall marketing plan then you should be in good shape.  But in our experience, this is the most common place where things go wrong - right out of the gates –  So I had to put it right at the top of the list.

The ways to fix this are clearly outlined in my last post, so I won’t repeat here.

Issue Number 2: No One Actually Owns Interactive

This is the next most common problem we see.  We often see marketing departments aligned by product line, geography, or vertical markets or something else.  And, though in some companies this may work on the interactive side, these are definitely few and far between.  More often than not it’s a problem when there’s no single person in charge of the Interactive Marketing Plan and Programs.  Without one person holding accountability it’s difficult to read, react, adjust and optimize on the fly.  It’s also that much harder to have a coordinated online presence when it’s scattered across different resources.

Mike addressed this well in his post How to Build an Interactive Marketing All-Star Team:

Start at the top.  I don’t care whether we call it a VP Digital, VP Interactive, Online Marketing Director, or even if you just call it Marketing Lead, but I need someone to lead this department.  I want this person to be the somewhat rare combination of a marketer who has dabbled in or played most of the roles below, and who has been elevated for consideration for this role because he or she has consistently found ways to make these functions work like a well-oiled machine.  I see too many organizations that hire this leader based largely on business and education pedigree, and not on marketing and experience pedigree.  Your MBA and previous investment banking experience are great, but that doesn’t qualify you to run this function if you don’t first understand how these interactive pieces work together.

Issue Number 3: The Wrong Person Owns Interactive

To some extent this goes hand in hand with Issue Number 2 above, and Mike’s description of the right type of person to lead the charge.  But, just as dangerous as having No One Person in Charge is having The Wrong Person in Charge.  This can often come in a lot of different flavors:

• Putting the young and “edgy” person in charge of interactive because they are online all the time, even though that person doesn’t have a marketing background
• Hand in hand with the above point, if that person isn’t a senior-level marketing leader who is accustomed to working with and for CEOs and full management teams, chances are they - and your Interactive Marketing — won’t see much success.
• Ignoring the necessary versatility - Settling on someone who isn’t able to participate in all facets of your marketing including strategy, planning, creative and program execution.
• Ignoring the necessary expertise - We explored this in Issue Number 2 above but it’s critical to have somebody that understands and has been involved in the different aspects of Interactive Marketing rather than just the person who has been in marketing the longest.

Issue Number 4: Afraid to Ask for Help

Whether it’s bringing in somebody from the outside to assess, evaluate and plan, bringing somebody on to coordinate a transition to a structure that relies heavily on interactive marketing, or as a longer term augmentation to your existing resources, it’s OK to ask for help.  Bringing somebody in for a project, for part time or full time often makes so much sense for all the reasons outlined in numbers 1 through 3 above.  We do this for a number of clients under a program we call Outsourced Chief Interactive Officer (CIO).  So, don’t be afraid to ask somebody for help.

If you can avoid these 4 most common issues you have now laid the foundation for success with the right plan and the right leader.  Now it’s on to Step 3, which we’ll cover next week.

Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

I’m not sure when Warren Buffet uttered those words, or in what context, but I have every reason to listen to and embrace that type of thinking.

Chris Brogan is no Warren Buffet, but he is no stranger to building businesses and personal celebrity. He set the marketing world on fire yesterday when he published his daily rate - the rate a business pays (or at least is asked to pay) to occupy his full attention span for a day. The rate is around $22,000. For those of you who haven’t seen that number previously, insert your yikes, holy s%^&, and no ways here.

That’s more than Barack Obama earns on a daily basis to address issues far more important than marketing strategy. That’s 1.5 times what Kevin Durant, the NBA’s second-leading scorer, makes on a daily basis.

I love the fact that Brogan published it. He clearly thinks - and more importantly his paying clients think - that his contribution in a day is worth $22,000 or more.

Particularly in the marketing world, we see too much of the opposite these days. Within the next 5 minutes, I can likely find a $500 website offering, or a $49/month consulting package, or someone offering a $15 hourly rate on high quality copywriting. It’s ugly, and whether marketing folks like to admit it or not, it has a negative impact on all of us.

Just today, we had to make 2 or 3 tough pricing decisions in our business. Fortunately, we have a pretty simple set of questions we ask ourselves when we’re trying to determine pricing.

• How much value can we create for the client?

• How much value does the work create for Right Source Marketing?

• At what level of revenue and/or profit can we genuinely get excited to do the work for the client, ensuring that we’ll deliver the optimal experience for the client and for Right Source?

Yes, we consider hard costs. Yes, we consider time and effort. Yes, we consider what the market will bear. That being said, our primary considerations are value (for the client and for us) and level of excitement.

Old models based on flawed pricing assumptions are falling by the wayside daily. You - as a marketing professional, firm or agency - have two choices. Succumb to the pressure of price, or resist that temptation and pitch and deliver value.

About the Author: Mike Sweeney is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing. Don’t hesitate to drop Mike a comment on this post. Follow Mike on Twitter for more marketing commentary.

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released their most recent study Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, which contained quite a few interesting nuggets for marketers.

First, the Internet now has surpassed newspapers and radio to become the third most popular news platform in the U.S.  According to Pew:

The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:

• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Now for some of us, this research data didn’t really tell you anything new, just put out some numbers confirming existing suspicions.  After all, we live in a world where Google’s Market Cap exceeds that of the venerable GE .  And yet, we see everyday that many companies still aren’t placing enough value on their online marketing presence.

Typically, this isn’t by intentionally avoiding the online side, but because, as one client often expresses it to me “We don’t know what we don’t know.”  With that in mind, here’s the first of a couple posts on how to make sure you are taking maximum advantage of your online opportunities.

Step 1: Take a Hard and Fair Look at What You Are Doing Now - And How it Fits With Your Overall Marketing Plan

Before you know where you are going, you need to figure out where you are.  Take a look at your strengths, what are you doing online now that is working?   Where are your areas of improvement?  And most importantly, what does this part of your marketing plan look like?  This piece is critical, as your Interactive Marketing Plan needs to be integrated with your overall marketing plan.

If you have the internal resources to do this assessment - great.  Often, however, that isn’t the case, or you may benefit from an outside set of eyes, brains and experiences (remember “We don’t know what we don’t know?”).  For our clients, we have a process called Interactive Shift and typically address the following areas:

• Marketing strategy
• Integration between traditional and interactive marketing strategy and tactics
• Website design
• Website usability
• Website content
• Search engine optimization
• Pay-per-click search engine marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Blogging
• Website analytics
• CRM

Regardless of if you do it yourself or work with an outside expert, coming out of this first step you should now have a sense of everything you are doing online, your strengths and potential areas for improvement.

Now it’s on to Step 2, which I’ll cover in my next post…

Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

I love software. I use software as a consumer. I use software as a businessperson. I use relatively simple software for simple needs - Outlook for email, Salesforce for CRM, QuickBooks for accounting, WordPress and others for publishing and content management, and so on and so forth. I also make part of my living from advising and providing services to software companies, and those services often include software recommendations.

Great software is irreplaceable. Most software is easily replicated, but nonetheless irreplaceable. As a matter of fact, some types of software are so irreplaceable that they have even made certain types of people…well, replaceable.

Marketing software comes in a lot of flavors - CMS, CRM, Analytics, Marketing Automation, PPC Management, Email Marketing - and can help you accomplish many of your marketing goals.

Here’s what it can’t do. It can’t build your marketing plan. It can’t develop your core message. It can’t replace leadership. It can’t generate creative ideas. Software is just a tool, not a marketing strategy.

Do Businesses Actually Think Software Can Solve all Marketing Problems?

Yes, some do. The blame for this lies with both the software providers and the business decision-makers.

I met with well-respected software executive a few weeks back to discuss some upcoming projects. He makes and sells B2B software, and therefore needs to market his B2B software. We discussed how we work with software companies, tossed around ideas about what is working from a lead generation and nurturing standpoint, and made some plans to address some of his company’s immediate needs. Towards the end of the conversation, he asked a seemingly innocent question:

“What about using HubSpot? Seems like a pretty sophisticated, comprehensive solution. What are your thoughts?”

My problem wasn’t the question. It wasn’t the mention of HubSpot, or software in general. It was the implication that this type of software could really represent a “plug and play” marketing solution. Marketing strategy, design, tactics and tracking in a box. Fill out a few forms, and…BAM, you just built a world-class marketing program.

(Disclaimer: This post is not a rant about HubSpot. I don’t know a single person that works for the company. I’ve never even seen their products, never hired them for their services. I am familiar with the model they are pursuing because they’ve been pretty transparent about it (kudos to them) and familiar with the company because they’ve been very smart about marketing their wares (kudos again). Hell, I even invested in a company that was designed to deliver on the same promise HubSpot wants to deliver on.)

Anyway, I answered the question in the most diplomatic way I could think of, and we moved on to other topics of discussion. That being said, the brief conversation clearly stuck with me and inspired this post.

So What’s the Real Problem You Are Getting At?

The real problem is two-fold.

First, many software companies are being deceptive. Deceptive with their messaging. Deceptive with their sales tactics. Even deceptive with how they represent the people they employ.

Second, while many of these software companies profess to “make your business stand out”, in the end they are contributing to the “Me Too Marketing” that results in every company looking like a mirror image of the next one. Sure, they put a nice messaging spin around it. I’ve seen Find/Get/Keep. I’ve seen Find/Convert/Close. And one more: Turn Searches into Sales. Is that all that marketing is about? Is it that simple?

Let’s dive into the deception topic quickly by way of example. One particular company raised a boatload of money a few years back and used it to build what amounts to an automated pay-per-click search engine marketing platform. They also used the money to hire “Internet Marketing Consultants” in bulk, in every major city, and now in secondary markets as well. Here’s the problem. These “Internet Marketing Consultants” are media salespeople. The only consulting they do is helping their small business clients figure out whether to spend 5k or 10k per month on…you guessed it, their pay-per-click platform. Need I say more? Is that what a company really wants out of their “Internet Marketing Consultant”?

And now, let’s get into the “Me Too” issue. I love processes. I love systems. I love software (really, I do). If everyone follows the same “rules of the game” put forth by the same 2-3 software companies, social media superheros, or agencies, then we’re just building factories. Factories that find, get and keep. Factories that listen, engage, connect. Factories that crank out the same website, PPC campaign, email template or landing pages as the next guy.

It’s a beautiful thing that so many entrepreneurs (and accompanying businesses) have been created over the last 10-15 years. It would be awfully sad for those same entrepreneurs - after exhausting the requisite blood, sweat and tears - to look, feel and operate just like the next guy. That will make for a lot of followers, and very few leaders.

My Advice to Businesses

Strive to be different. Sure, go ahead and look at the 800 pound gorilla, then decide to do something different.

Recognize that no piece of software can replace strategy.

Recognize that no piece of software can replace a well thought out plan.

Recognize that no piece of software can replace talented people.

If marketing software continues to encroach upon the “human” facets of marketing, will all marketers just become software consultants who know how to operate the latest and greatest on-demand, dashboard-based, WYSIWYG, web-based solution?

If so, I’ll certainly take myself out of the game. Maybe I’ll just write blog posts.

Oh wait. That won’t work. Just read about a new software company that reads your mind, writes and formats your blog posts, distributes them, reads and responds to comments, and even compiles all the good ones into an e-book. Sigh.

About the Author: Mike Sweeney is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing. Don’t hesitate to drop Mike a comment on this post. Follow Mike on Twitter for more marketing commentary.

Search marketing is one of the great tools in a marketer’s arsenal.  We help our clients with search and find it’s often one of their most effective lead generation vehicles.  That being said, I’m going to take a few minutes and pick on pay per click search here because, in so many cases, businesses are getting sold on paid search as a “full marketing solution” — and they’re believing it.  In these cases the reality is it’s usually being sold by salespeople disguised as marketers who only really look at the media side of marketing (Yeah, you know who you are!), and not all the other facets.

I could have chosen social media, broadcast or a host of other channels - it’s not this specific channel that I have an issue with as much as the focus on any one channel as some sort of magic bullet.  But, for some reason we see this in the search channel far more than any of the others.  Likely this is because the ability to so directly track — spend to searches to clicks to leads/sales to CPA — creates such a clean picture that it’s tough to argue against continuing to feed that success until it’s maxed out.  And once maxed out then, and only then only then, moving on to another channel.

The problem with that single channel focus, however, is it is incredibly risky.  Not Shaun White, Half-Pipe X-Games Cool risky but Russian Roulette Foolish risky.  The reason is simple - all of your eggs are now firmly placed in one basket.  And we all know the rest of that cliché.  And we all also know this - the marketing landscape is constantly changing, and now more rapidly than ever before.

So, maybe paid search is knocking it out of the park for you today, but what happens if Google adjusts the rules of AdWords again?  Or when Yahoo and Bing unify their platform in the near future with their deal now having cleared the biggest regulatory hurdles?  Or with just the fact that the amount of competitors you’ll find in paid search now looks to be far greater than even 2 or 3 years ago with later adopters coming to the table, the growth of automated platforms, locally focused management tools and a host of other reasons.  By now you can certainly see where I’m going with this.  It’s incredibly likely that no matter your industry, there isn’t just one magic bullet but an integrated mix of tactics.

Rather than getting sold on pouring everything you have into paid search, the better move is to diversify your tactics.  As Mike often says, think of your marketing approach like a stock portfolio.  By investing in and testing multiple channels, and adjusting based on which ones succeed and fail, you’ll have multiple sources of leads/sales and not be exposed to the risk of just one channel.  Certainly include paid search in the mix, but don’t make it your only ingredient.  Because that doesn’t make you X-Games Cool, it makes you Russian Roulette Crazy.

Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

About six months ago, I was invited to meet with a top 10 Washington D.C. law firm to discuss helping the firm address its social media and search engine marketing strategy. I was very excited about the meeting. In my mind, since this law firm was comprised of sophisticated, well-educated and talented people, we’d likely be able to uncover some unique marketing opportunities.

We talked search engine marketing. The firm had never addressed it formally. We talked social media. This area had not been addressed either. We talked website. Built 5 years ago, and the four folks in this meeting had no idea how to change it or who makes changes to it. OK, so this is going to be fun - a green field if you will. That was my mindset.

Well, at least that was my mindset until I asked the following question:

“What is it that makes you guys different from the thousands of other large law firms? What differentiates you from the competition?”

A seemingly innocent, basic marketing question. Actually, it’s not even a marketing question. That’s a business question, one that every single employee in the organization ought to be able to answer.

Someone gave an answer, but all I heard was stumble, bumble, stumble…our partners are world-reknowned…stumble, bumble, stumble….we have 10 offices in the U.S. alone….stumble, bumble, stumble…we’re very well-known in real estate…stumble, bumble, stumble.

Unfortunately, this does not represent a unique scenario in the professional services category. More than any other industry, professional services firms struggle with building a marketing strategy that creates some separation from the pack. Instead, they fall into the “me too” marketing trap over and over and over again.

A lot of professional services firms do look the same from the outside. They offer the same services. Same rates. Same structure. Same types of people. Same tired glossy brochure. There is no easy fix for this problem, however, there are some clear mindset changes your firm can embrace in order to start creating separation:

1) Stop listening to the same 5 - 10 people that every other firm is listening to.

Reputation matters. Connections within an industry matter. Vertical knowledge matters.

You know what else matters? Creative ideas and solutions. Perspectives carried over from other industries. People who challenge you to look at your firm’s identity in a different way than you’ve looked at it for the past 20 - 30 years.

Always look beyond the usual suspects. You may just find some new superheroes that can help you separate from the pack.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you live in the Baltimore/Washington area like we do, or have only heard about it on the news, everyone knows we’ve been hit here by record snowfalls.  I saw yesterday that Baltimore just passed Syracuse NY for first place as the snowiest city in the U.S. this winter.

While technology has allowed me to continue working on just about everything I would in a normal day, some of the down time “snowed in” got me thinking about how people might use some of that down time to address items on the “marketing list” (you know, that list some people never quite get to).

With that mind, I went back through some of our posts to highlight 5 pretty tangible and actionable items you can think about, evaluate and improve right away.  And while I tried to avoid the “clip show” format — Didn’t you always hate when sitcoms did those episodes that were just recycled material? – It did seem to work best in this format.

So here you go – 5 Marketing Fixes for a Snowy Week.

1). Fix Your Core Messaging:

We all know how important it is to have a clear and consistent message – But do you have a messaging problem?

Your Marketing Message in 30 Seconds

2). Diversify Lead Generation:

In an ideal world, you are managing multiple buckets of leads, each bringing a different volume, a different quality, and a different set of metrics.  But are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

Buckets of Leads

3). Convert More Visitors to Leads:

Make sure you are getting the most from your online visitors.  Tune up your contact forms and landing pages by looking at 5 common problems.

Better Contact Forms = More Prospects

4). Improve Your Search Marketing:

Writing ad copy for pay-per-click ads, particularly for Google AdWords, is an extremely challenging task.  Are you getting the most from your paid search campaigns?

The Most Challenging Copywriting Job in the World

5). Update Your Website:

Your company may have all kinds of exciting things going on - new customers, partners, upcoming events, etc.  But if from the viewpoint of the random website visitor, you’re not doing much lately it may not be worth taking the next step to get in touch.

Keeping the Newsroom Fresh

Implementing these 5 fixes will help you to upgrade your marketing — And give you a reason to avoid that snow shovel.

Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow@willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

For those of you reading this in a location outside of the Mid-Atlantic, here’s a news flash: the Washington DC/Baltimore area is buried under 30 - 40 inches of snow and blizzard conditions right now. This leaves a lot of time for shoveling, family time, movies, sleep, and….doing business?

Joe Mechlinski, President of EntreQuest and a good friend to the Right Source Marketing team, wrote an interesting post today that describes why this type of time period is an excellent time to push your business forward, even when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible. I loved Joe’s post as I think that most people “throw away” weeks like this, but Joe forgot to include the one item that he was already engaged in - producing and distributing valuable content.

Much like the EntreQuest team, Right Source Marketing has had a busy week even with the nasty weather conditions. Much of our time in between shoveling has been spent developing proposals for existing and new clients who want to pursue aggressive content marketing programs. Of course, before we get to the point of putting together a proposal, the client needs to first understand what content marketing is, and why it’s become a very hot category.

So what is content marketing?

Let’s quickly address what content marketing is NOT in order to get to our definition.

Content marketing is not new. Some of the most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world have been using content marketing for years.

Content marketing is not advertising. Advertising still has its place, but most advertising is still designed to interrupt the consumer or businessperson and ask them to pay attention to a particular product, service, or offer.

Content marketing is not about just creating compelling pieces of content. The phrase “If you build it, they will come” does not apply here.

Content marketing is a marketing technique that stands on three pillars:

• Creating unique, valuable and relevant content for a particular target audience

• Distributing that content to that target audience in an organized and systematic manner, in order to…

• Encourage members of the target audience to read, think about and act on the content

In essence, a content marketing strategy requires your organization to become a custom publisher. You can publish blog posts like this one. You can publish ebooks. You can publish videos. You can publish white papers. The possibilities really are endless, which is why most organizations require a content marketing strategy for creation and distribution.

Why is content marketing so hot right now?

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42, one of the foremost experts on content marketing and a fellow judge of the B2B Twitter of the Year Awards, recently published the 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey. Based on a survey of 259 marketing professionals, Junta42 found that content marketing spending will comprise 33% of the average marketing budget, up from 29% in 2008.

While I can likely come up with 20-25 reasons why content marketing is growing in popularity and sophistication, you don’t need to know 20-25. These five reasons should be enough to push organizations to pay more attention to content marketing:

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So we talk about blogging a lot around here.  And why not - I mean after all Marketing Trenches IS a blog so it does make a whole lot of sense.  We’ve also found that our blog is one of the best, and probably THE best, tools for our business.

Yet despite that ringing endorsement, and all the reasons that companies, organizations and individuals blog, all too often we still run into the same most common objections to blogging.  So, I thought rather than listing all the reasons you should blog, many of which we have covered before, I would set about answering these 5 most common objections.

1). “This is going to require a lot of time and resources.”

This one is probably the most common, and does have some legitimacy.  In a recent client meeting I mentioned that starting a blog is really easy, blogging…not so much.  The point is, it takes some commitment and you need to have a level of dedication and consistency to it or it won’t pay off.  But unlike many other marketing endeavors, the investment here really isn’t much in the way of hard dollars, but instead is time.  There may be some initial spend in blog creation, hosting etc. but that is minimal.  Some folks even use free hosted blogging platforms, although for a variety of reasons we opt not too.  At any rate, the investment here is time.  And really, how many things that are worth doing don’t take some time commitment?   Set aside a small block of time a couple days a week to write and the impact will be big.  If you hit writer’s block and aren’t sure where to start, you can even call yourself and leave a voicemail with the start of a post idea.  You can use a transcription service like Google voice or Jott to send yourself voice to text notes.  The key is making the commitment to do it.  As I said above, things that are worth doing almost always take some level of commitment.  And those who can’t commit often find themselves with a boat load of the “bad kind” of free time - while their competitors who did commit reap the rewards.

2). “We don’t have enough to say.”

Really?  I mean really?  While this one comes up frequently, I’m not going to give it much attention here because I think it is the weakest of all the objections.  I’m sorry, if you don’t have much to say then your problems run much deeper than whether you should have a blog or not.  If you don’t think your company has anything to say that is relevant, useful and interesting then you may want to start polishing that resume.

3). “We don’t want to take away valuable employees from their primary roles.”

This one ties back to number 1 a bit.  Sure resources at companies are tight these days, and people are being asked to do more.  Often the marketing team will be responsible for the blog but needs subject matter experts from the company to provide content.  The key is finding a way to make this as easy and efficient as possible.  One idea is to prepare a list of questions and ask for an email response, or do a quick impromptu video.  Sometimes once an employee appears on the blog once, and receives some feedback/ego boost/praise they’ll be excited to do it again.  This works particularly well if you link to their bios and or provide a feedback loop through comments or email.  A lot of the time this is also because people don’t understand what you are doing and why - a good explanation and a walkthrough on the value makes a lot of sense.  And if it turns into a lead or a new client, trust me all that apprehension goes away very quickly.  As with objection #1, if it’s important enough - and they see the value in it — people will make time

4). “We’re afraid of opening ourselves up to complaints and criticism.”

Trust me, complaints and criticism are already out there.  You having a blog is probably not going to start - or end - that.  By not being involved in the conversation, you are simply letting the complaints and criticism happen without you, and not having the chance to address them and often resolve them.  Wouldn’t you rather be involved in the conversation and have a chance to make it right, or at least learn from this one so you don’t have the same complaints and criticism again?  Most people will generally give you a fair shake if you genuinely try to address their issue.

5). “It’s going to be hard to measure.”

I’m shocked we still hear this one because there a ton of ways to measure your blogging efforts.  Like with any other marketing, take a look at your goals and then set the right measurements.  Between measures like unique and return visitors, length and depth of session inbound links, online mentions, views, followers, subscribers (RSS and Email), retweets, awareness in your market, inbound leads, opportunities converted to sales or just a nice letter or blog comment from a happy customer, there’s no way it’s going to be “hard to measure.”

So if you can’t seem to get over those common blogging objections I hope this has given you fuel for your fire.  These are the top 5 objections we hear, but I’m sure there not the only ones.  Feel free to add your own in the comments below and we’ll add them to the list - maybe we’ll even get one that stumps us!

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.