I just finished reading a great new whitepaper from Compendium CEO Chris Baggott.  (Compendium is R.O.Why! Marketing's blogging solution partner.)  Entitled Corporate Blogging and Email Marketing: Why They Work Together, the paper addresses how effective marketers (and their advertising agencies!) are using these two proven tools to acquire customers and cultivate strong relationships.

A study by the Pew Center for Internet & American Life notes that email and search are the tied as the number one online activity.  Email marketing best practices have long proved that email is ineffective for acquisition; for that we must turn to search.

But how do we fully leverage search when pay per click (PPC) advertising is costly and, as pointed out by Marketing Sherpa, captures only a small portion of the available market?  Organic search is the answer, however another problem surfaces:  the vast majority of corporate websites are not updated with enough new content frequently enough to effectively accomplish dominant search positions.

As Chris Baggott points out, "What’s needed here is an easy to execute strategy for targeting large numbers of keywords and ranking on them in the organic results. This is where organizational blogging comes in.  At the end of the day, search engines want to deliver relevant content."

He continues by explaining that the relevance of your content is driven by:
•    Page titles
•    Keywords
•    Recency and frequency
•    Humanization
•    Metrics - bounce rates, page visits, visit duration


From Chris's piece, blogging for business make sense for a few key reasons:

  1. Mr. Edelman of the Edelman Trust Barometer says that "Employees are the new credible source of information. We have data that shows an employee blog is five times more credible than a CEO blog –and I say this as a CEO blogger."
  2. "Widespread employee blogging presents an opportunity for many new pages of relevant and closely related content thus increasing your document collection."
  3. "By organizing blog content around specific keywords and topics instead of authors, business blogs become laser focused on serving up only the most relevant content based on the searchers input."

Although the adoption of blogging for business by corporations is growing rapidly, we're clearly just at the beginning.  However, as more organizations embrace the idea of leveraging employees for content creation and integrating email marketing with it, latecomers will find it increasingly difficult to own their market via their blogs.

If you'd like a copy of the whitepaper, please contact me at blecount [at] rowhymarketing [dot] com.

Thanks to Chris for a great piece, and to Compendium for supporting R.O.Why! Marketing with a great blogging solution.  Our clients love it and we look forward to introducing many more people to the platform this year.