We’re firm believers in Content Marketing and Blogging, and discuss them often on this site.   So a recent eMarketer survey study doesn’t come as much of a surprise – that corporate blogging keeps growing and growing.

According to the study, released August 17th 43% of US companies will be blogging by 2012.

“Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Because of the apparent staying power of blogs in corporate settings, eMarketer forecasts continued growth in company use of blogs for marketing purposes. This year, eMarketer estimates just over one in three companies have a public-facing blog used for marketing, a proportion that will rise to 43% by 2012.

And companies are really starting to recognize the value of blogging:

“Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service,” said Verna.

“There is evidence that smaller companies are embracing blogging at greater rates than larger firms,” said Verna. “This might be because larger, public companies—particularly in industries such as pharma and financial services—have more legal, logistical and regulatory constraints than smaller firms.”

So if your company has taken a summer break on your blog (or longer) or you are debating whether or not to start a blog for the first time here’s one more reason not to get left behind, and to walk the walk (thanks again Kevin).

What do you think?  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments area below.

At Right Source Marketing, we’re big believers in blogging.  Companies and individuals blog for all sorts of reasons, and we’re no exception. Mike and I discussed a number of them, as well as the benefits in more depth in a presentation we gave for the GBTC earlier this year on Why Blogging Should be the Hub of your Social Media Efforts (slides included below).

However, one of the often overlooked uses for a blog is to accelerate the sales process.  We discussed this in the presentation and I wrote specifically about this idea back in January in Using Your Blog to Skip the First Meeting.

Just this week we’ve discussed this concept with 3 different clients in 3 different meetings, so I thought it was worth a revisit.  I encourage you to read the full articles above about how you can use your blog before you even engage in the sales cycle, as well as think about ways you may even use your blog during the sales cycle.  I, for one, have been known not only to use the blog to skip the first meeting, but occasionally to write a post right after meeting with a client, to subtly reinforce and re-emphasize a point that works in our favor.  In essence, I’m “narrowcasting” a message to a very specific prospect.  Who knows, maybe even one day salespeople will talk about the “one post close”

Are you blogging to accelerate the sales process?  I’d love to hear some of the things that you are doing in the comments below.

While there are countless articles and blog posts published on website design/redesign on a daily basis, blog design/redesign receives far less attention.  The irony in that is that in this day and age, a blog is as important (if not more important) than what passes as a standard website.

So when Will and I sat down 3-4 months ago to discuss our internal marketing projects,  the redesign of the blog became the clear top priority. Why? For us, the reason was simple. Our blog represents our unique personality, attitude, and original thinking.  While our corporate website is more than adequate for most situations, our return on blogging (ROB) has outperformed just about every other marketing program we’ve ever executed.

And that’s just us. If you talk to some of our clients that have followed our blogging advice, they will echo those sentiments.

In the spirit of launching the new blog, the following are some of the specific issues that drove our decision to redesign (and may drive your decision as well).

Content management became a bit messy and complicated.

Blogs evolve over time. When we launched Marketing Trenches a couple years back, it seemed to meet all of our content management needs. That changed quickly. During the 6 months preceding our redesign, there were too many times when the words “if we could only do this” were uttered in our meetings or conference calls.  Now, we can do this, and that, and the other.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was speaking with a few colleagues the other day about the different benefits of social media as a whole, and blogging in particular.  The folks in the room had varying levels of social media involvement, from no involvement at all to heavy involvement.  Each of us discussed what we hope to get out of social media, why we blog or might consider it, and how businesses can benefit from blogging.  The discussion went on for some time, covering the wide ranging benefits from SEO opportunities to more frequent customer touch points and everything in between.  After a while, it quieted down a bit and somebody asked me if they had missed anything on the list.

Skip the First Meeting

While our blog serves many purposes, one of them I hadn’t heard mentioned by the group was one of the things that I find most useful.  Having a well planned blog and social media presence, with what we hope is interesting and insightful content, allows us to Skip the First Meeting.

So what do I mean when I say Skip the First Meeting?  Unfortunately, despite how well you may try to vet things ahead of time, inevitably in our business you run into an opportunity that 5 minutes into that first meeting, after you’ve sniffed each other and gotten a bit more of a sense of your businesses –  you both know isn’t a fit.  You don’t think alike, you don’t value the same things, really whatever those components may be.  Of course generally by this time somebody has ordered food, or driven out of their way, or fired up a PowerPoint or laser lights show, or something else entirely, and it’s too late to do anything but spend the next 45-60 minutes or more there despite you each knowing this isn’t going to work out.

Now, we often head this meeting off at the pass.  We’ll send a contact or prospect a link to our blog ahead of time, and also encourage them to connect with and follow us on social networks, and ask them to read through these pieces ahead of time before scheduling that first get together.  By doing this, we make much more efficient use of their time and ours.  We try to convey the idea here that we want to be involved in strategy and planning and believe in taking a holistic view of marketing, and that shines through in our posts.

When we discover the poor fit, we each save ourselves the time of an unproductive meeting where we just won’t be a fit for each other (although sometimes we do miss those laser light shows).  And just as importantly, for those that could be a fit, we’ve fast forwarded over the glossy part of the first meeting and are digging right into the important and meaningful parts that are usually saved for a second meeting.

So while there are probably 100s of reasons to blog and to get involved in social media, if it works for your business you may want to try to Skip the First Meeting.

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.

We talk a lot about social media on Marketing Trenches.  And for good reason – Social media seems to be at least one item on the agenda for about 90% of the meetings we have these days.  Everyone wants to run 100 miles an hour to do something on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  I wrote about this previously in Want to Succeed In Social Media? It Sure Helps to Have a Strategy.

A big part of any strategic plan is revisiting that plan –  Making sure you are doing all the things you should, adjusting the pieces that aren’t working and continuing to optimize the pieces that are.  Sometimes though, we get so excited for the newest, shiniest, brightest, sparkliest things that we neglect the basics.  Herndon Hasty’s recent article in Search Engine Watch, That’s so 2004: Everything Old Is New Again, reinforces this – both from  a Social Media and Search Engine Optimization perspective.  I encourage you to read the whole article, but here’s one quick excerpt:

Blogging: The Oldest Social Media

In the midst of the discussions about Twitter strategies and how to build a Facebook fan page, the huge value that a company-driven blog offers has gotten lost in the shuffle. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to think about reaching out to potential customers in 140-character snippets, maybe it’s because these sites have already built the platform for us rather than having to create one ourselves, but keeping a blog for your company still brings value to your site and your brand that these newer social outlets can’t.

Combine a drive by the engines for fresh content with SEO value that newer social media can’t touch. It’s an invaluable channel that’s frequently overlooked and neglected — in many cases because it’s not the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. Remember, if you have enough news and content to Twitter about, you have enough to blog about.

I couldn’t agree more.  We like to view a blog as the hub for your social media efforts.  It serves as the platform that feeds the rest of those efforts, and it has undeniable SEO value.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredibly important to have a social media strategy that encompasses all the places you should be — just don’t neglect our old friend the blog.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in our comments section.

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.