Question: Our company is ready to start blogging (Content Marketing) but we don’t really know where to start. Any tips or ideas for making sure we get off to a good start?
It is great that your company is looking to reap from the benefits of content marketing. It is important of course to both consider the entire strategy and recognize that content marketing alone isn’t going to solve all of your business problems.
Like any integrated marketing strategy, content is part of the puzzle and in a world where there are thousands of pieces of content being published every minute, creating is only a portion of what you will need to do to succeed.
However, I also know that you can quickly become bogged down by the overwhelming amount of information on how to blog, why to write articles, where the best content comes from and so much more. I’m pretty sure that the phrase “Paralysis by Analysis” was created by someone researching content marketing. However, I digress.
In short, I’m a big fan of using content to tell your business story and inform your potential clients. So let’s start there and create a short list of questions you should know the answer to before you start blogging for your business.
- Who is our customer? Beyond the obvious, what do you know about your customer that is unique and can help you understand how content may help drive their buying process?
- Where do our customers go for information? Do you have any idea what sites or other blogs they read? Where are the popular sources for content online in your industry and what can you learn from those sites to help you build your own?
- How will we connect with our customers? Just writing and posting blogs won’t drive anyone to your site. Once you have the content developed and posted how will you deliver it to your customers? This in essence is content marketing, the content development itself is just writing or creating the collateral.
- What are our goals? Most companies just start writing but they don’t really know what their goals are for content marketing. You have to have a plan and focus on executing it. AND…if your plan isn’t working how will you shift. Furthermore, how will you know?
Start by answering these questions and then start writing, but just know…
Blogging just for the sake of blogging will never get the return you are looking for. Does your business understand how it is using content to drive engagement, sentiment and/or revenue?
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.