Leading Results is a marketing services firm offering marketing coaching and consulting utilizing Duct Tape Marketing. We offer 1:1 coaching, outsourced VP of Marketing services and group coaching on social media, referral marketing and marketing plan development.
We help small businesses stop wasting money on marketing that doesn’t create results.
Why Bother With Blogging?
Four common questions and our answers
What am I going to write about?Who will read it? Why should I bother? Where will I find the time?These are the questions we most
frequently hear from clients as we advise them to get blogging on their
website. Lets see if we can give
you some good answers to these very valid queries.
Where will I find the time?The short answer is, you probably won’t.Blogging, like all social media, takes
raw time cycles.You can best
solve this issue in one of two ways: 1) throw money at the problem – there are
lots of writers out there that will create content for you on a weekly basis at
a reasonable cost ($100-$150 per blog post). But what you gain in scalability,
you lose in personality (more on that later).2) Spread the burden.
If you have 8 capable writers in your company, have each do 1 blog post
per month – voila, you have 2 blog posts per week.Have your marketing team work up a theme for a month and
just have each contributor write to that theme.Sure, it won’t be publish-ready, but editing is a lot
quicker and easier then creating.
Why should I bother? Here are three good reasons (and there are many more) 1) Depth, 2)
Personality, 3) Search Engines.By
depth, we mean that blogging allows you to add a layer of depth to your
product, your services and your customer’s experience that you don’t get in a
dry, factual corporate brochure.A
blog is up to date and relevant to what is happening now and doesn’t get stale.A blog also adds an element of though
leadership to you company – you can get out in front with your opinions and
observations.Personality is about
letting you company shine through the graphics and carefully thought out text
on your website.A blog, over
time, shows the company personality – how you regard the market you participate
in and the way in which you look to enrich your customers experiences.Finally, the search engines like new
content.Those spiders they send
out are hungry and they need new content to keep coming back.A blog accomplishes that with ease.
Who will read it?
There’s a joke that when you start a blog, it is probably the most
private place on the internet.And
that is usually true.But as the
spiders see and catalog it;as
prospects and partners search for relevant content;as your customer community becomes aware of it, more and
more traffic will come.You can
help this out by cross posting your blog to LinkedIn, your company Facebook
page and announcing posts via twitter, but organically, it will come as well. (of course, it helps to write about what
people are searching for)
What am I going to write about?The simple answer is what do you think your target customer
wants to read about.What are the
questions that are most frequently asked by sales prospects and current
customers?What calls come into
your support or help desk?Look at
your customers – what are some of the successes with your product or the most
unique uses have you seen?What
advice can you give to someone looking to try your product or service out?You can also solicit your customers and
prospects for the questions they most are looking for answers to. Ultimately
your content should be educational, humorous, time or money saving or help
people be safer and more secure.
If you hit one of those points, you are providing something worth
reading.
So help people find you, find out about all the
great things your company and the people in your company do and get out there
and start writing.It takes time
to develop content and depth, but like any habit, once you create the momentum,
it is hard to break it.
Blogs Worth Your Time
In staying with our blogging theme, you should check out copyblogger. This site is chock full of tips about
how to write better and more compelling copy for the web.
Social Media Tip Twitter Tools
If you are using twitter,
you should be using one of the various different tools to manage the streams
and tweets from various groups of people you follow.Tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck.I had been using both because Hootsuiteoffered timed tweets,
but TweetDeck recently introduced the feature of delayed tweets – so now in my
preferred application, I can create 3 or 4 tweets and schedule them to go out
over a period of time.It’s a nice
way to build consistency, even when you can’t be consistent.
Want to learn more about social media,
we have group coaching class that kicks-off on August 17th (there
are 4 seats left).To learn more,
Referral Marketing Tip All customers are not equal
All customers are not created equal when it comes to
referrals.You need to take the
time to identify your true champions – those that consistently refer you and
your business.Then, spend some
extra time and attention to better educate those customers on your ideal
referral, your process for handling referrals and the incentives you provide
for customer referrals.You can
also equip them with some tools to help them help you.Items like pass-along referral cards,
referral coupons and special web-site address for referrals are great
investments in a fully operational referral engine.
Cool Tool You Can Use Wiretap Sound Recorder
Our cool tool for this issue is the Wiretap recorder.This handy application lets you record
and easily edit anything that makes sound through your computer.You can use itfor something as simple as creating a
ring tone or as important as recording a skype or other VOIP-thru-PC call. Free
to try.
