A few days ago, a friend of mine who’s starting work as a content marketer told me that she was putting together a plan for the company’s new blog. She was starting from scratch, she said, and this meant that she would putting the base in for future marketers in the company to take off from. This meant that her task was very important, as well as would be set the benchmark for the team.
She asked me for a few pointers, and I jotted down a five point list I’ve distilled from my time as a content marketer at Freshdesk. Her experience is as a sales professional, and this gives her a unique vantage point of the system, and I thought this would be a good lens to look at the process through.
Here’s what I told her –
1. You have to know what your blog stands for, what it’s going to advocate over the long term. For example, the Freshdesk blog talks about how customer support is very important for companies and how new companies are looking at support as integral to their success. That’s the blog’s positioning. This makes the blog a place for support professionals to come in and read about their peers and get tips to improve upon their skills. It has become a destination for them. This kind of thought leadership is beneficial to the business as a whole, because by garnering top-of-the-mind recall among professionals, you have made your product one of the first ones in contention when organisations look for a solution. You have to do this for your company.
2. Once you do that, you have to be consistent. Twice a week would be ideal. A productivity newsletter I follow recommends Monday and Saturday as the best days for a blog to go out, and I have found these two days great for traffic as well. This done, you must have a pipeline for over a month at least. Meaning that the post you put out today should have been written a month ago, and you should have eight more ready for the next month. Don’t go live before filling up the pipeline. This doesn’t mean you don’t write an immediate, urgent post responding to something in the present. I just mean to stress that the blog should never go silent on your posting days.
3. Invest in a good writer and researcher. And yes, they both may be one person. Hiring tip – I use the word ‘good’ knowingly. Don’t go for eloquence (If that comes along, it’s a bonus). Instead, go for the grinder, the person who will sit down and write. This person is more likely to get the job done for you than an aspiring novelist (I should know. I’m one!) Grammar can be learnt, discipline not so much.
4. Benchmark yourself against great blogs in your domain. For example, if you are in the CRM space, read Salesforce, Predictable Revenue, and of course, Hubspot, and so on religiously. Read what newcomers are doing and writing about. See what new strategies blogs are using to grow audiences and more traffic. Think about how you can employ them for your blog. Replicate, measure, repeat.
5. Look at the blog as another top-of-the-funnel point, not as just a branding exercise or somewhere for the company to write a few things. Leads from the blog can be pure gold if you do this well. The important point is that this will take time. At least six months to an year of work has to be invested before returns emerge. Don’t be impatient. Quality writing takes time. I can assure you that once you get the processes in place, the returns will be cumulative.
Organisations sometimes hire a writer or two and put them in charge of things like landing pages, blogs, whitepapers and in general, everything that needs to be written. This can work unto a certain extent, but the best way, in my opinion is to keep marketing and writing as separate activities, meaning that a content ‘marketer’ can look at growth, traffic and SEO while content ‘creators’ can concentrate on churning out stuff the target market wants to read. These are different things, and need completely different skill sets. This might delegate and encourage ownership in a clear, more efficient manner.
