At Right Source Marketing, we’re immersed in content marketing on a daily basis.  We write about it, we execute it on behalf of clients, we execute it for our own firm, we talk about it at seminars, and unfortunately we even dream about it.   No nightmares yet, just dreams of a world where companies recognize the value of quality content – distributed at the right time, in the right places, to the right people.

Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic.

Given our heavy focus on content marketing, we were thrilled about four months back to run into a company that was developing a content marketing product, and wanted to use – no surprise here – content marketing to help launch and grow the product.  This past Wednesday marked the official launch of Informous, a new B2B marketing platform that aggregates industry-specific product content in one, easy to search place.  Not only is the entire concept designed to help product marketers reach qualified buyers by leveraging existing sales and marketing content, but Informous is eating its own dog food.  There was no shortage of content at launch – a press release, a blog post, a video, an email, directory listings….and this is just the beginning.

Unfortunately, the Informous team is in the minority.  Too many individuals – executives, marketers and non-marketers, small business owners – are afraid of content marketing, and here’s where that fear comes from:

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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.

As marketers, we all know it’s important to know your audience, and critically important to know as much as you can about your customers. That’s why it still surprises me when a company you feel you have a relationship with just completely misses it. Yesterday I received a clear example in an email from my local car dealer.

Here’s a small snippet of that message below with some information [substituted] to protect the guilty:

The [brand] Model Year-End Sales Event is happening now at [dealer] and because of your status as a preferred customer, you can now get $1,000** Bonus Savings plus 0%* APR financing and a Free Maintenance Plan.+

Visit the link below to receive your $1,000** Bonus Savings today!

Now, I probably have a deeper relationship with my car dealer than most people. Those of you who know me well enough are probably REALLY sick of me going on and on about how great my Prius is. I lease my vehicle for business, so they know I’m back there every 3 years. And, with a growing family each of those last two times we’ve also swapped our family vehicle for something that can fit the kids and their ever-expanding stuff.

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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.