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I’ve had clients and internal stakeholders ask me some pretty detailed about their corporate blog performance. They’ve wanted to know why their bounce rates are so high, why they aren’t getting more traffic from search engines and why the pageviews-to-visit ratio is so low. In some cases, these are valid questions to ask about a corporate blog, but generally, they are pretty close to irrelevant. When you launch a corporate blog – either to market your company or provide information or support to existing customers – you need to focus on the right metrics.

Especially for corporate bloggers who either consume mass media blog content regularly (or who got their starts writing for independent mass market blogs), it’s natural to use the metrics that have become accepted in those venues. Unique visitors, pageviews and stickiness measures directly indicate the performance of blogs like Technorati and Gadling because of the underlying business model. However, they don’t speak directly to the success of your corporate blog. The reason for this is pretty simple: traffic does not directly drive revenue for your organization. It may contribute to sales possibilities down the road, but it doesn’t offer a straight connection, particularly in the B2B space.

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The next time you take a look at the analytics for your corporate blog, go deeper than the dashboard. Down in the weeds, you’ll find information directly applicable to your sales efforts. Mine this data, and communicate it to your sales team: they will have a powerful new tool for getting inside their targets’ heads.

There are many ways you can use your corporate blog’s analytics to drive revenue gains across your company. Here are my five favorites:

1. Watch who’s watching: Don’t (just) look at volume. Instead, take a peek at the company names. You can use this to find out who in your target market is interested in your company. Also, take a look at the posts they are reading. This will provide insight into the specific products or services they are exploring.

2. Check for repeat visits: Do some companies keep coming back? This speaks to level of interest and commitment to your brand, not to mention specific business issues or products or services. Frequency and regularity translate to higher potential for entry into the sales cycle and conversion.

3. Dig into keywords: When a visitor uses a search engine to come to your corporate blog, the keywords used can be telling. Keep an eye open for those that indicate a business pain point or particular product or service.

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Unless you’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the minutiae of social media marketing, you’d probably think that having a story retweeted dozens of times will translate to a hefty increase in pageviews and exposure for your corporate blog. Well, as you’re planning your social media marketing strategy – as with any marketing effort – it pays to think about the people you’re actually targeting.

I’ve always been stunned by the disparity between the action a story gets on Twitter and the actual amount of blog traffic to which it translates. It seems that one really doesn’t have much to do with the other, and a recent study shows why.

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Either you’ve been tasked with starting your company’s blog, or you just think it’s a good idea. Now what?

Unless you’ve already dipped a toe in the blogging pond, the entire experience can seem overwhelming. Since any corporate marketing initiative comes with a lead time – consisting of everything from design and development to legal approvals – the best first step is to start a blog of your own. As your company is going through the necessary machinations, you can take the time to get a feel for what blogging is.

This may seem like a big step, but it’s actually rather tame. Don’t spend too much time planning (or worrying about what you’ll write). Just head over to WordPress, register and look around.

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B2B social media marketers are in the early and middle stages of their efforts, according to a study by MarketingSherpa. The survey finds that, almost independent of social media marketing category, trial programs and transitions (to strategic roles) are most common, with relatively few companies using these tools strategically.

Overall, 33 percent of companies are in the Trial Phase, with 40 percent in the Transition Phase. While this constitutes an overwhelming majority, the fact that 23 percent of social media marketers have moved into the Strategic Phase is actually promising. Businesses are moving into this advanced state – and they are using social media to drive returns.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

When you rely on tools like Twitter to support your marketing efforts, you’re assuming a certain amount of risk: you can’t control the stability of the platform. As we’ve seen with Twitter’s recent capacity problems, you can lose access to 125 million people because the platform is rendered unavailable. The alternative, of course, would be to sacrifice access to that profound amount of users — with the ante for Facebook up around 500 million.

You can’t stay away, but you can’t simply accept that availability risk will be a part of your future. Fortunately, there’s some space in the middle. Check out our recent guest post on SocialTimes to learn four ways you can hedge against Twitter platform instability.

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Social Media Marketing: Integrated or Standalone?: How do you handle social media marketing? Is it integrated into your overall marketing plan, or do you treat it separately? If you go with the latter, you’re in the minority, according to a new study by MarketingSherpa. The research indicates that 52 percent of respondents integrate social media with both online and offline marketing tactics. Meanwhile, 31 percent integrate social media marketing efforts with online tactics only, with 1 percent integrating with offline only. Sixteen percent of the respondents integrate social media with any other marketing tactics.

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New Twitter Terms Benefit IT Channel Partners: Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

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Marketing Automation: Be Careful: Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

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Don’t Forget about Paper Marketing!: The potential for social media to build your brand and drive sales is salient, but there’s more to marketing than electrons. Direct mail remains a powerful way to engage IT decision-makers and lure them into your sales cycle.

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A Contrarian Approach to Social Media Marketing: The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.

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Most Popular Keyword: EMC

And, you may have missed …

Twitter Mastery Makes Money: Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Read the article >>

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Follow @entermarketing on Twitter >>

Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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Don’t Forget about Paper Marketing!: The potential for social media to build your brand and drive sales is salient, but there’s more to marketing than electrons. Direct mail remains a powerful way to engage IT decision-makers and lure them into your sales cycle.

Read the article >>

A Contrarian Approach to Social Media Marketing: The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.

Read the article >>

Twitter Mastery Makes Money: Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Read the article >>

Five Tips for Marketing and Selling Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

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How to Sell Emerging Technology: Right now, the buzz around cloud computing is endless. But, it’s just the latest trend. In the past, it’s been B2B marketplaces, best-of-breed solutions for targeted business challenges and even the internet as a whole. The hidden cost of innovation is that IT solution provider’s need to explain the value and viability of these emerging technologies to skeptical decision-makers who are heavily invested in the status quo. Eventually, you know, today’s innovation will become tomorrow’s legacy platform, but that doesn’t make getting over the hump any easier.

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Most Popular Keyword: social media marketing

And, you may have missed …

Social Media Marketing: Who’s Investing?: A year ago, the results of this MarketingSherpa survey would have looked a lot different. Nearly half of respondents indicated that “social media is a promising tactic and will eventually produce ROI” and are increasing budget conservatively. This may not seem exciting, but a “cautious” commitment is a commitment nonetheless. Only 17 percent replied that they aren’t going to invest in social media marketing.

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It’s natural to want to entertain or inform your readers with the best content you can put together. Rather than push a product, the conventional wisdom holds, you want to engage, interact and make the world a better place for your clients.

And you do. You really do want these things. The only problem, of course, is that such lofty ideals aren’t free, and you’re the one stuck with the tab. So, you need to generate some revenue, and your corporate blog is one of the ways you do that.

To get the most out of your blog, however, you need to find that middle ground between pure advertising and pure news/information/education. Essentially, you need blog content that can unobtrusively deliver an engagement opportunity while still delivering value to your target market.

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