by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 6, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Blogs are still a very effective way of reaching an audience, especially if you’re in a niche market. While it may be true that social networks and microblogs have outpaced the traditional blog, the opportunity for you to build thought leadership and branding is better served by blogs.
More than 50% of web users will read blogs this year. According to eMarketer, by 2014, 150 million Americans, or 60% of the population of the U.S., will be reading blogs. Blogging has become an accepted part of the online media landscape and blogging is easy to do.
“Trends in blog reading are expected to maintain an upward course as blogs continue to gain influence in mainstream media,” said Paul Verna, a senior analyst with eMarketing and author of “The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media.”
What’s the upside for someone looking to make an impact using social media: think about doing a blog.
Here are some other posts about blogging you might find interesting:
Pros and Cons of Starting a Blog
6 Tips to Make your Blog More Successful in Reaching the Professional Tradesmen
LinkedIn: Great Tool to Drive Traffic to Your Website
by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 5, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
Blogs are a great way to build thought leadership within specific categories. While personal blogs have stalled in recent years as consumers move towards social networking and microblogging, company blogs are on the rise. Maybe you’re missing an opportunity.
According to Paul Verna from eMarketing.com, over a third of companies have a public blog used for marketing and it’s anticipated to rise to 43% by 2012.
“Studies had shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales – as well as improving customer service,” said Verna. He also said that smaller companies are embracing blogging at greater rates than larger firms due in part to more constraints whether it be legal, regulatory or other reasons.
So what does this mean for manufacturers? Those who get on board now will have the advantage long term since they will be developing relationships through thought leadership and will become a “go to” resource for customers and potentials.
If you like this post, you may want to read:
Pros and Cons of Starting a Blog.
6 Tips to Make your Blog more Successful in Reaching the Professional Tradesmen
If you like this post, please share it with a friend.
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 30, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
So what does this all mean? Manufacturers who still think the only ones using social are the 18-29 year olds should think again.You might be missing a golden opportunity to reach your target audience.
It means folks over 50 that are using social media (yes, even professional tradesmen and contractors) nearly doubled from 22% in April of 2009 to 42% in May of 2010 according to the Pew Research Center. That’s good news for manufacturers who are trying to reach the older set of professionals who typically own or manage contractors.
- One in Five (20%) online adults 50-64 say they use social network sites on a typical day. That’s up 10% over last year.
- Overall, 92% of those 50-64 send/read e-mail every day. 76% get news online.
- 52% of 50-64 adults are using social media on a regular basis.
| Social Media Trends, 2009-2010 |
| |
% of online adults who use SNS or Twitter, 2009-2010 |
| 2009 |
2010 |
% Point Change, 2009-2010 |
% Change, 2009-2010 |
| Social Networking Use |
|
| All adults |
46% |
61% |
15 |
33% |
| Age |
| 18-29 |
76 |
86 |
10 |
13% |
| 30-49 |
48 |
61 |
13 |
27% |
| 50-64 |
25 |
47 |
22 |
88% |
| 65+ |
13 |
26 |
13 |
100% |
| Twitter/Status Update Use |
| All adults |
11% |
17% |
6 |
55% |
| Age |
| 18-29 |
20 |
27 |
7 |
35% |
| 30-49 |
11 |
16 |
5 |
45% |
| 50-64 |
5 |
11 |
6 |
120% |
| 65+ |
3 |
5 |
2 |
– |
| Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, August 2010 |
If you’re reading this, I may be preaching to the choir but I’m sure you can think of someone within your organization you could forward to and let them know older people use social too!
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 29, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Your company may see the value in social media, but they may not have yet taken the first step. The real question is, are they ready for it? You don’t want a READY-FIRE-AIM strategy.
I recently read an article from Lee Odden in the Online Marketing Blog titled, 19 Questions to Determine Corporate Social Media Readiness that I thought was appropriate for this audience.
Identifying a company’s current state of social media readiness helps them establish a baseline on which to build. There are a number of either free or low cost tools out there that can help you identify your company or brand’s current social activity level. It’s important to get a handle on the difference between how social the company is and will need to become so you can put together a strategy and plan.
Lee outlines 19 questions you should be asking. I’ve highlighted the top 5 that got my attention:
- What goals do you want to achieve with social media as part of your marketing effort?
- How will you measure/evaluate social media?
- Are you conducting a formal effort at monitoring social media channels?
- What are your current social media channels and destination websites/pages?
- Is there a particular business unit or product that can serve as a test case?
I’d be curious what questions you’d come with to add to the list.
If you find this post interesting, please pass it on.
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 28, 2010 | Events/Trade Shows
For those of you that are going to Boston this weekend for the NECA Show, we put together an insider’s guide to Boston by asking friends and business associates about gems in the city that you might not be aware of. It includes Restaurants, Nightlife, Events and more. It’s available at www.sonnhalter.com/boston.
We hope you have a good show.
by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 22, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Your Blog is a repository of helpful content that can effectively attract a large number of prospective customers.
Here are 5 simple steps and suggestions to improve your company’s blog as a major tool for fueling new business leads:
1. Creating
Each new blog post is a new opportunity for you to be found online by your best prospects. Some quick suggestions:
- Write to a specific target audience and provide answers to their advertising/marketing challenges.
- Write consistently: is important to creating regular readership. Write at least 3 to 5 posts per week.
- Post should average 350 to 450 words and be pleasantly scannable to the eye. Break up long paragraphs, use bullet/numbered list when possible. Highlight key words and thoughts.
- Write in the inverted pyramid style, lead with your conclusion. People read differently online than they do for print. They tend to scan much more.
- Identify and consistently use key words in your post title. You want to be able to dominate these words in Google search.
- Let your reading fuel your writing.
- Write 1 original post to every 4 to 5 resource posts. You’ll never be considered a thought leader without original content, but you won’t generate much traffic if all of your content is just your original thought. A balance of both needs to be provided through your blog.
- Write with an “evergreen” style that will have a long shelf-life and provide a great return on your time investment.
- Provide the “Readers Digest” version for your writers. Do the work on behalf of your readers and pull out the nuggets in simple language that is concise and easy to read.
2. Optimizing
- Carefully think through your blog’s heading. A “heading” is a stand-alone phrase that describes your blog’s content that appear below it. I usually advise clients to create a blog descriptor statement for the header that lets a reader and search engines know the purpose and intent of the content. Mine is “Marketing to the professional tradesman in the construction, industrial and MRO markets.”
- Be sure you own your domain. A person that still has “wordpress or blogspot” in their domain won’t be able to change blogging platforms without losing traffic.
- Be sure your site is indexed with Google. If your pages are not indexed, then Google is not crawling them.
- Build quality inbound links. There are lots of online business directories where you can just submit your URL, agency’s name and a description of your services. There are also many social media sites where you can simply build links to your site. Writing guest articles and posts and optimizing our press releases can build links. The best way however, is to produce valued content and create a blog that is a repository of helpful information for your target audience.
3. Promoting
- Make sure your content can be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon with Share buttons.
- Jumpstart traffic by repurposing your blog’s content through an email newsletter that is sent every-other-week. This is an easy thing to do. Since you already have the content and can create an email template that is reused, it will take literally minutes to prepare the newsletter and send.
- Build a sizable Twitter following that is targeted using TweetAdder and repurpose your blog content to your Twitter account using a program such as Social Oomph.
- Write guest posts, invite others to guest post for your blog.
- Comment on other blog posts and online articles, sites such as STAFDA or HVAC Professionals on LinkedIn, etc. Select those sites that are frequented by your target audience.
- Write content for searchability.
- Publish new blog content to your other social media accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Conduct your own primary research using your blog; generate links and traffic through press releases using your groups on LinkedIn.
- Be proactive in facilitating speaking opportunities by creating a Speakers Page for your blog, list the topics and titles that you can speak to. You can also provide links to your past speaking engagements through YouTube, post photos through your Flickr Photostream.
- Pull blog content together, expand SEO opportunities, creating Slideshare Presentations, Whitepapers, etc.
4. Converting
All of this activity isn’t worth the time investment if it doesn’t turn visitors into leads.
- Place your RSS Subscription Feed button above the fold, near the top of you blog’s homepage. Visitors who subscribe will automatically receive updates every time you publish a new post either through an RSS Reader or through their email inbox. I would suggest setting up an RSS feed through Feedburner.
- Also place a subscription for your email newsletter within your blog’s sidebar to create Opt-Ins from site visitors.
5. Measuring
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Fortunately you can measure a lot online and continually hone your program.
- Review your blog site’s analytics daily to see what posts are generating the most traffic, what search terms are being used, where traffic is coming from, who is linking to you, links readers clicked on, page views, etc.
- Utilize your email newsletter analytics to improve open and click-through rates. Test the day of the week your email newsletter is sent, time-of-day and subject line copy.
- Create a first-step call-to-action for your readers to know how to initially engage you. This could be something similar to my Industry White Papers. Make it something simple and of value that doesn’t take a lot of consideration but does separate to qualified prospects from those that just want to glean what they can from you for free.
- Use this suite of tools to analyze your marketing efforts:
