Content marketing is a growing trend for businesses in all industries.
Marketing professionals have discovered that investing in owned content (e.g., corporate websites, blogs, microsites) is critical to the long-term success of a company in content marketing.
According to a study conducted by MarketingProfs, the Content Marketing Institute, and MarketingProfs, the blog is one of the top five content marketing tactics employed by B2B marketers.
What does it take for a business blog to be successful?
Curata conducted an online survey to find out the answer. We focused our analysis on the tactics and best practices of bloggers who receive 10,000+ monthly visitors. This group is known as the “10K Club.”
The 10K Club’s success has been attributed to six key attributes, as revealed by interviews and data analysis.
Get executive support and investment
Content marketing is essential to driving pipeline growth.
It is equally important that the CMO invests in the creation and promotion of a business blogging as part of a broader content marketing strategy.
Only 24% of businesses with less than 1,000 pageviews a month hire additional resources to manage their blogs.
Create a blogging strategy
You should consider identifying your target audience as part of your basic blogging strategy.
Who is your audience?
What are your goals?
How to create content and curate on your blog
What you will do to align yourself with corporate campaigns and those of business units
Note: You should continue to post reactive and random content in parallel with your planned content.
The 10K Club has demonstrated a key success factor by providing shared services and infrastructure to allow the rest of the organization to contribute to the blog.
80% of 10K Club Bloggers have created a Center of Excellence team (CoE) to allow other teams within their organization to participate.
The CoE team is responsible for key responsibilities relating to the Business Blogging Strategy, including providing…
Blog Code of Conduct
Guideline for Engagement
Staff members in the design, editorial, and writing departments
Best-practices
Create high-quality, relevant content
Avoid being “egocentric”. Focus your blog on topics that help your audience become better at their jobs and more successful. Do not focus your content solely on your products or solutions.
For more information on non-egocentric marketing content, please see Four Steps to Content Marketing Illumination. ).
Consider the following to create high-quality, relevant content:
Use subject matter experts both internally and outside.
Use charts, infographics, and other visual elements to engage readers.
Take advantage of humor in content marketing.
Posting frequently
When asked about their frequency of posts, 91% said that they update their blogs at least once per week. Post often and establish a regular cadence for your audience.
Marketing your business
Successful content marketers promote their marketing. They don’t just “throw” a piece of great content to their Social Media team. They work with multiple groups within their organization and adopt a multichannel approach.
The best content marketers are…
Align yourself with the social media team to ensure a smooth transfer of content into LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Implement their marketing tactics (e.g., promoting their content on their network).
Use the content of demand-generation teams and marketing operations to nurture buyers within marketing pipeline.
Use paid services such as Outbrain and Disqus. Check out the list of Content Marketing Promotion Tools to get more ideas.
Measuring your impact
Members of the 10K Club measure their pipeline impact in order to improve and demonstrate performance. While pageviews are still the most important marketing metrics, here are some other important ones:
Share or Like
The time spent on site
Subscriptions
Marketing leads
Comment
The 10K Club is unique in that it tracks the influence of individual writers on marketing and sales as well.