blog

As you get ready to jump into the social media marketing fray, the draw of just getting started can be powerful. The potential associated with this form of marketing is high, and the pressure to claim your space on the most visible social networks is intense. It’s also fraught with risk, especially if you leap before you look.

Want to make your corporate blog – and Facebook page and Twitter presence – a success? Here are four crucial objectives to focus on:

1. Publishing regularly: this may seem counter-intuitive, as it deals with your company, not your market. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that both sides of the equation are affected. Without regular content, your market has no reason to engage. Further, it’s challenging to create interesting and useful content regularly, so you need to make that a clear goal.

Objective to set: frequency of publication

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Organic growth translates to missed opportunities. When you launch your corporate blog, don’t sit back and wait for readers to come to you … and then wait some more for them to step into your sales cycle. Instead, seek them out, and use your blog as a first step in lead qualification.

Combine direct and social media marketing, and you’ll gain a powerful demand generation tool.

Blogs do have a tendency to be discovered (i.e., to gain readers). Whether it’s through searches, a link on your website, a PR effort or tweets and status updates, traffic happens … it just happens slowly. And since high-value readers are likely to be only a small portion of your organic traffic, you could be waiting quite a bit before your social media marketing effort generates any leads. Take a proactive approach, and this changes drastically and quickly.

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If you think you’re losing readers on your marketing blog, it might not be because of your content. In fact, they just might be forgetting about you, and that’s a problem you can fix.

Think about the media that bombards your clients — or anybody — every day. There are television shows, blogs, newspapers and corporate marketing materials. It’s tough to work your way into the “mandatory reading” rotation, especially since you’re using your blog to market (and may not be publishing daily).

To maximize your visibility, you need to remind your core readers that they like your content — usually, that’s all it is. Read our recent guest post on SocialTimes to learn how you can keep bringing your readers back for more!

[Source: SocialTimes]

Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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Linking out to other blogs may be the best way to increase traffic to your own. Odds are you won’t really lose any pageviews, as readers naturally hit an exhaustion point anyway, especially on a corporate blog. And, if you line up the right partners, you’ll benefit from their overflow. The result, of course, is a net increase in readership across your entire “network” of partnered blogs.

Sound interesting? Check out our guest post on SocialTimes to learn more.

“Large” creeps its way into just about every social media marketing endeavor. Companies want legions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. And a blog that isn’t highly trafficked and packed with comments almost feels neglected.

Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.

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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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Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you’re doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.

However, no mountain is too high to climb. To reach the corporate summit and gain approval (and maybe even budget), you need to know how to sell the corporate blogging concept to a guy in a tie who thinks the internet is dangerous.

Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

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It’s relatively easy for companies on the Fortune 500 to get material for their blogs. These large enterprises have access to beefy research departments, paid primary research and other tools that smaller companies simply can’t afford. But, this doesn’t mean you’re stuck writing “soft” blog posts that lack the punch of big stats and pretty charts.

To integrate data-driven blog posts into your editorial calendar, all you have to do is use the news. By working with the research of the major players and media outlets in your industry, you can add more texture to your blog without having to invest heavily.

Here are six ways to turn the public domain into your free “research department”:

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Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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