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The Dreaded Blog Blockade

By: Jason Scragz

We all start our business blogs with great intentions but then run into the dreaded Blog Blockade:

  • “What do you mean I have to write another blog?!” Creating regular, quality blog posts is time-consuming and never lets up.
  • “I’ve been staring at an empty blog calendar for an hour.” Blogs are very effective when done as a strategic series. This requires upfront planning and thinking like a publisher — not necessarily on top of an exec’s Favorites list.
  • “I wrote the last one, it’s your turn.” Multiple authors relieve some of the frequency pressure but someone has to plan, organize, post and strategize the things. 
  • “I’m so sick of this topic.” Regularly creating posts with high quality content, SEO, appeal to different buyer personas, are accurate and useful — well, that’s hard.

So is it worth it? It is — blogs are excellent for building brand awareness, thought leadership and soft messaging. It has few hard costs although soft costs are another matter. You can also directly measure traffic and set conversion goals, something many marketing activities can’t offer.There is also SEO for search ranking gold, which increases led gen and can shorten sales cycles.

Altogether business blogging is a very good thing, and will get even better if you can make the challenges less of a problem. I won’t tell you that blogging will suddenly become a breeze. Why should it? Frankly, if lead gen and sales blogging works easily for everyone, doing it well would hardly be a competitive advantage. But there are things you can do to help yourself get better, faster and stronger. In blogging anyway.

  • Build the habit by doing it. It gets easier over time. I swear.
  • Keep a list of 5 different types of posts. For example, your types could include an infographic, a summary of someone else’s post (with attribution and links!), a numbered list, a corporate or customer story, or an amusing post. (Make sure your audience thinks it’s pretty amusing too.)
  • Mix and match. Match one top marketing message with a different format of post. These mixes will give your readers more variety — and you too.
  • Build a blog ed calendar. Listing different post types and mixing them with key messages will also help you build your blog ed cal. Think of series and building interest towards new offerings and launches.
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Content AND Strategy

Very nice summary from Sonia Simone of Copyblogger of what your freelance content creator (Hello, Me) should be doing for you: making you remarkable and memorable with content and content strategy.  Sonia sums it up:

  • Understanding what the audience wants.
  • Understanding how different formats work together.
  • Understanding what makes content shareable.
  • Understanding how content creates the overarching message you want.
  • Understanding how to drive the behavior you need, whether it’s a sale, an email opt-in, or international support for the planet’s patchwork of space programs.

 

 

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Enterprise File Sync and Share: Issues and Vendors

My new article posted today in Enterprise Storage Forum.

“File sync and share” is shorthand for sharing files among multiple users and devices, and synchronizing the shared files to retain file integrity. The process is very familiar to most users as a consumer-level file sharing application, typified by vendors like Dropbox.

However, consumer-level file sharing is not nearly as popular with enterprise IT.

Read more here; interesting stuff if I do say so myself.

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The Dynamic Content Framework

By: Markus Grossalber

A dynamic content framework strategically uses new and repurposed content to support your core marketing messages, customer sweet spots, and favorite marketing channels.

The right content mix will be different for every company depending on your existing content library, key marketing messages, preferred content channels, in-house staff assignments, and budget. Some popular content types include:

  • Attractive white papers, reports and ebooks prove your technology. Technology customers depend on white papers, reports and business-of-technology ebooks to help them make purchase decisions. When they’re interested in a certain technology or vendor, they’ll look for an in-depth source to read.
  • Case studies prove your customers’ positive experience. Case studies are compelling to prospects. Case studies flesh out testimonials and give them teeth, and are key to building referencability.
  • Bylined articles promote thought leadership and brand awareness. Bylined articles build industry recognition for your technology and position your executives and engineers as experts to your target audiences. This results in highly qualified leads.
  • Social media content engages customers and encourages relationships. Blog posts are particularly useful since you can reference them in social media postings and discussions. Blogs help to put a human face to your company and lets you immediately respond to your customers’ trending interests.
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Content Marketing Strategy and Content Strategy Are Not the Same Animal

I had some trouble wrapping my brain around the differences between content marketing strategy and content strategy. Here is how I think about them now:

  1. Content marketing strategy is the process of planning content for marketing campaigns. Example: A director of marketing prepares for an email marketing campaign. She decides that the campaign needs three related emails, a video for the CTA and a landing page. The video already exists and she assigns the emails and landing page content to a writer.
  2. Content strategy is the process of discovering corporate content in order to leverage it across verticals, languages, and campaigns. Example: A content strategist and his team audits all outward-facing content throughout the company. They identify the content type, title, subject, abstract and links/locations. They record their findings in a database or spreadsheet, which tells marketers what content is available and what content gaps to fill.

Content strategy takes more resources and time upfront but saves ongoing money and effort.

How Much Time and How Many Resources?

Content strategy is a big job but not an overwhelming one. I like Kathy Hanbury’s take on this in her post “5 Things You Need to Know about Content Strategy.”

Content strategy activities are scalable and can be modified to fit any budget. You don’t necessarily need a large, formal content strategy. You just need to take the time to think things through and determine your goals, resourcing, workflow and success metrics, which can save you from the high cost of ineffective content.