The following is one of the best-of from students in David Toliver’s Georgetown School of Continuing Studies Interactive Marketing class. The following post is by David Longwell.

It‘s hard to think of a marketing tactic used these days that is more disliked by consumers than email. We all get so many emails now it has even gotten boring to complain about them (You’re just back from Florida and now you’ve got 1,000 emails to go through? – boo hoo).

Emails received from companies (other than yours, of course) are often intrusive junk, cluttering up mailboxes and adding undue stress to busy lives. Still, companies in the US spend over $1 billion dollars a year on Email Marketing, with projected growth of 11% per year through 2014 (Forrester). While that’s less growth than projected for hot channels like Social Media or Mobile Marketing (34% and 27% respectively), marketers are still committing increasing dollars to email campaigns.

But if consumers cringe at email, why are companies continuing to use it as a communication tool?

Some marketers get it – emails can (and must) be useful. The most effective emails from companies provide a kind of customer service, and always pass the ‘thank you’ test. Not only am I happy when I receive these, I’m relieved and grateful. What marketer wouldn’t covet that kind of response? It’s ok if there’s a soft cross-sell included, because the main purpose of the email is to bring value. Read the rest of this entry »

The following post was initially published on the Content Marketing Institute Blog (October 11, 2011).

“Uh oh,” you may be thinking. “The marketing department is talking about that whole blogging thing again. Last time we did this, it was a disaster. Worse, no one seemed to like my posts.”

Yikes! Stop right there! And think again!

Yes, a lot of corporate blogs are awful. But neither your company’s blog nor the posts you contribute to should bear a sense of impending doom. We spend a lot of time helping clients manage their blogs. This involves bringing together subject matter experts, sales reps, marketing employees, and executives — many of whom have unique ideas but have never written a blog post.

One of the first questions we get from new bloggers is, “What makes a good blog post?“  As we answer, the doom drifts out of the room and is replaced by the glowing light of nurturing leads and increasing sales. Cha-ching!

We thought we’d share our answer with our readers here. 

1. Good blog posts speak to a target audience.

Figure out who is buying what you’re selling and write for them. If your company specializes in building mobile applications, you’re likely selling to executives and marketing departments, not mobile app developers. Your own developers can still write content for your blog, but they should keep content way less technical than it would be if they were writing to their peers.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »