Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Michael Gerard, CMO of Curata. He is responsible for Curata's marketing strategy and all related activities. Michael has more than 25 years of marketing and sales experience, having successfully launched and sustained three start-up ventures, as well as driving innovative customer creation strategies for large technology organizations (IDC, Kenan Systems, Prospero (mZinga) and Millipore).
Curata's Business Blogging Survey of 428 marketers revealed what it takes to develop and sustain a highly successful blog. Key findings of the study demonstrate that blogs have most certainly not disappeared. Instead, business blogs have morphed into a mature part of enterprises’ content marketing and publishing ecosystem. For example:
●80% of marketers use blogs as part of their content marketing strategies.
●70% of business bloggers have had their blogs for more than two years.
●44% of business bloggers have more than two blogs.
There is an exclusive group of business bloggers, which we’ll call “The 10K Club”, who receive more than 10,000 page views per month. This groups represents 21.8% of all business bloggers in the study. These bloggers certainly create great content, but they are also experts at thinking “out of the box” when it comes to developing innovative promotion strategies.
Here are 4 promotion secretes of the "10K Business Bloggers Club:"
1. Reuse- Repurposing content is a fantastic way to better promote your blog content, and create new resources at a lower cost versus creating new content. The Content Marketing PyramidTM provides a useful framework for creating and repurposing content.
The top of the pyramid contains heavy content, typically gated. (e.g., eBook) As you move down the pyramid, content is lighter and more easily absorbed and “digestible” for your audience. The base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is curated content, which is relatively low effort and lends itself to high frequencies.
Although this framework is commonly used to create smaller pieces of content from large surveys or thought leadership pieces; the best content marketers have learned that content can also flow upwards in the pyramid from items such as blog posts. Several of our 10K Club members have already discovered this; for example, one survey respondent said:
“We are preparing to package our best blogs into subject matter-specific eZines, which we will post on our website and promote”
2. Sales Enablement. Sales enablement, as defined by IDC, is:“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.“
Why should content marketers and bloggers care about sales enablement? Because it is a fantastic opportunity to increase content marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Bloggers, in general, are under-utilizing the potential impact of their own content on sales enablement; however, not 10K Club members. The 10K Club are taking full advantage of this opportunity; for example, 10K bloggers:
•Are equipping sales reps with content they can forward to their prospects. The best sales folks understand the importance of maintaining frequent communication with their prospects; and these sales reps would like nothing more than a link to a valuable blog post published by their own organization that they can send to a prospect. The best bloggers understand this, and frequently email content to their reps to share with prospects.
•Repurposing the best posts as sales enablement assets. Great content marketers and bloggers are always thinking up new and innovative ways to deliver valuable content to their audience. 10K Club bloggers often repackage their own blog posts into content/assets that can be used by their sales team. For example, the Curata blogging team developed an in-depth post on Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. This post was transformed into a tool for use by the Curata sales team. Posting these types of content assets into sales enablement tools such as SAVO also represent a best practice.
3. Influencer Marketing. Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individuals) rather than the target market as a whole. The following examples provide insight into how bloggers can use influencer marketing to promote their content and company:
- Buzzsumo: How to Assess Content Marketing Performance
- Not only did Buzzsumo use curation in this post, but they also cited a number of key content marketing influencers throughout the post. (i.e., Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter and Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing)
- Curata: Content Marketing Predictions: 6 Big Themes for 2015.
- By creating an infographic made of all expert predictions for 2015, we were able to target this specific group of influencers. This also helped promote the piece because these influencers, who have very large followings, are likely to share the post.
4. Advocate Enablement. Top bloggers know how to turn their most passionate customers into a community of advocates who will amplify their messaging. This is achieved through:
●Providing exceptionally valuable content.
●Ensuring that customers grasp an idea within 30 seconds.
●Using the customer's own information where possible to further engage them in the content, thereby providing more motivation for them to promote the blog.
●Providing customers the opportunity to easily share content with their own social community.
Some examples include:
- Enabling sharing directly from a blog site.
- Using advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or influitive to identify and mobilize your audience.
- For additional examples, check out Neal Schaffer’s post on “11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote your Content” for additional insight on advocate enablement.
To learn more about the strategies and tactics of the best business bloggers, check out the survey results in Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.
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