I’ve been talking about blogging in the ISA Automation Marketing & Sales Group on LinkedIn with Kerry O’Malley and Jim Cahill. The issue is, why do so many industrial companies not get the importance of blogging? Maybe it’s the terminology? How about if we call it “newsletter-ing” or “white paper-ing“? Would companies then realize how important this activity is?
Whatever we call it, newsletter-ing / white paper-ing / blogging is a critical communications tool in the 21st Century — for establishing a company’s credibility, building visibility in the industry, generating leads, and yes, even making sales. Ask Jim Cahill, Chief Blogger and Head of Social Media at Emerson Process Management. He’s on record in the book Groundswell that they regularly generate contacts that are worth millions of dollars in business via their blog: EmersonProcessExperts. Kudos, Jim!
I’m hoping industrial companies don’t get blogging because it’s just a terminology issue (which has a large, generational component). HubSpot’s been grinding the phrase “inbound marketing” into small businesses for several years now. Did you know that inbound marketing has been going on for many, many decades? Public relations is mostly an inbound marketing activity. I place an article in a magazine and hope hundreds of prospects will trip across it, read it, and call my company. Same for a product press release I send out – when the magazine picks it up, I want my prospects to find it and come running back to me.
Blogging is an important digital component of any marketing or sales program that targets techies. It’s CONTENT; hopefully good, meaty content. Not only are blog posts akin to newsletter articles and white papers… they have a lot of similarities to PR. Write a credible, info-filled white paper type article, but this time place it on your blog instead of in a magazine. Or maybe you write two versions of the article, one for your blog and one for a magazine. Now you get search engines like Google crawling all those great keywords and bringing your company higher up in the rankings. People can “follow” your blog and be notified when it’s updated. Influencers in the industry can easily find this information because it’s online and pass it along to your prospects.
We handle a number of client blogs and e-newsletters (which share a lot of info, back and forth). I’m always pleasantly surprised at how many editors subscribe / follow and then ask our clients for material based on these posts to use in their publications.
Ok, so we’ve changed the word “blogging” to “white paper-ing.” So no more excuse for industrial companies to have their heads in the “digital sand.” And there, now I’ve blogged about it, too 🙂
