My colleague Jenni and I just got back from the B2B conference in Orlando, FL and it did not disappoint. In addition to exhibiting Compendium at the show and meeting a lot of great prospects, the content of the conference 100% affirms what Compendium as an organizational blogging tool is all about! That being, blogging is no longer considered an experimental marketing tactic. In fact as Yuchun Lee, CEO of Unica and keynote speaker at the conference pointed out, marketers are turning to blogs and other viral forms of marketing as proven tactics to target key customers and prospects. Hear that… blogging as a proven tactic.
So, how do blogs exactly target key customers and prospects? Easy, blogs are better tools to get your brand in front of your key customers and prospects. Blogs return well in search. Search engines love the fact that blogs are content based (giving the robots lots of space to crawl), updated frequently and recently, and finally that blogs can have a very narrow focus making the content even more applicable for the searcher.
Therefore, one can assume that your blogs have a valid chance of reaching your audience before your website even does! If the blogs are going to be the first point of reference for potential prospects why not take advantage and use blogs as an acquisition tool. You can do so by experimenting with different calls to action that entice your prospects to “sign up for our online newsletter”, “join our mailing list”, “schedule a consultation”, etc. Capturing the data from your blogs return potential leads and a source to track your analytics and prove the ROI of blogging.
Before I close on the B2B conference I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a great big thanks to the speakers and the friends we met along the way. Exact Target friend Joel Book held a wonderful session on 7 Habits of Highly Effective Email Marketers (reminding me that Compendium is probably past due for an email deliverability audit!) And, new Compendium friend, Jamie Smith CEO of Engine Ready gave a wonderful session on analytics and how to link offline tactics to online advertising. Great new technology linking inbound calls to Web analytics, very cool stuff! Thanks for the great sessions, Joel and Jamie!
