Content Marketing

Even Perry Mason was challenged on how to optimize his blog to get people to easily find him.

I found myself at a neighborhood Harvest Party last night in Drexel Hill, PA that was well-attended by many people that I had not previously met. It was a great venue held in a cool little court area in backyard. However, with the right combination of cider, bonfires and live music, we all became friends very quickly. As I have experienced over the years when meeting new people, a great icebreaker is “what do you do for work?” I asked that question first this time, like many other times, and found myself surrounded by attorneys, most of whom were in one- to five person firms. Like most small business owners, this group of attorneys appeared that they were better at their craft than they were at marketing. Thank goodness, since I am a better marketer than an attorney!

This challenge of skills became even more apparent as the conversation spun on. I found that each attorney had some degree of a digital and social marketing presence, but it seemed disjointed causing underperformance by all.  Some had a blog, while others had a web site and a few others had both marketing properties. When the question was posed to me and I answered that I worked with SAP help drive our awareness to help businesses run better, they were intrigued. They wanted to know how to use social media to help THEM run their practices better. I had their collective ear!

What Good Are Keywords And Blogging To Marketing A Law Practice?
Now, I was holding court! (I have been waiting to use that line for such a long time!). Someone asked, “what good are keywords and blogging to marketing a law practice?” I noted that the common denominator across all business was that content is king. 60% of customers and clients are searching for content to help them make a decision on what business to choose … before they make the first phone call to that business.  That searching applies to whether you are a law firm or a software sales company! This statement intrigued each attorney. I think they realized that if they could get their content in front of their potential clients at an earlier place in time, then they could have more prospects. But, how? Now, the discovery begins!

The social media conversation moved from dismissing the use of tweets to promote a law firm to how to create great content to be found by clients searching for a solution to a legal problem!  I was not prepared to go too much deeper into the conversation, given the time that was needed. And hey, time is money, right? And I figured that this was my “free consultation”. However, I told them I was happy to demonstrate a few easy ways to make sure their web and blog content for their your can work  harder for them! The idea was to show them how to use a tool to get an understanding what potential clients where searching for on Google, so they can use the same terms to be found easier!

5 Steps To Finding Your Best Keywords
Here are the 5 simple steps that I advised to help create content that will be found easier. You too can use this advice, substituting your relevant words:

Step 1. Open Up A Google AdWords Account. Google AdWords lets you get under the hood to find the best words to get you found! It’s easy to set up a free Google AdWords account. If you have a Gmail account now, you are even closer to doing it!

Step 2. Find the Keyword Tool Under Tools and Analytics. After you open your account go to the Tools and Analytics tab to the drop down for Keyword Tool. This choice will put the engine at your fingertips!

Step 3. Enter your relevant terms. For instance if you are an attorney, like my new set of friends, enter works like “family law” and “Philadelphia Attorneys” and then click “Search” to generate words in the “Keyword Ideas” tab. These are the start of a collection of words that you should consider strategically placing in your web content, blogs and social media to be found … since there are the words that your prospects are searching.

Step 4. Investigate more relevant terms around your niche. You can go deeper into you research my using Google’s Ad group ideas tab, which will group key words around more refined niche areas.

Step 5. Download your words to begin to think about how to integrate them into your marketing. Create a ranked (by local monthly search counts), ensuring you have a mix of popular and less popular words.

Now that you have found how to find the keywords to incorporate into your content and messaging, think of some key ways to do it:

• Incorporate into blog posts with SEO-driven headlines and copy woven into the body. For instance, 3 Things To Consider When Hiring A Family Law Divorce Attorney In Pennsylvania

• Website design by working a designer to optimize your site for search. For example use “Family Law Services” as a page title instead of “Services”

I am glad that I attended that Harvest party! As I got back to my party after the marketing lesson I was out of my favorite beverage and wanted to refresh, that is, order (my beer) in the court!

Do you know how to blog? What if they had instructions like IKEA provides to help you get started?

I am fresh off of a trip from IKEA where we purchased a selection of put-it-together-yourself furniture! Many of my friends and other shoppers avoid IKEA for the simple reason of not knowing how to put their product line together! Full disclosure, I ran IKEA’s direct, loyalty, catalog and email marketing for the US for a few years. However, it’s not as if we all received furniture assembly on-boarding training. I embraced the simple instructions that are included with each piece of furniture to the point where I can now put together many pieces of furniture with my eyes shut!

So, how does this relate to blogging? Well, I just received a tweet from an SAP colleague who noted that he had a hard time making time to blog! I maintain that blogging is easy if you have a simple way in … a play, if you will. I have 3 of them that make it very easy to blog. I’d like to share these with you to make it easy for you to show the world the expert that you are and what is on your mind!

First, the average reader consumes content is short bursts, so we want to aim for a 2-minute read, which is typically 500 words or so. So, my blueprint for your blogging process is a 5-step, 500-word blog.

5 Easy Steps To Learn How To Blog

• Set Story up in first 100 words. You want to start to tell your story in the first 100 words. Set up your story within a story. I typically do not jump right into the “business.” Rather, I find my angle and then set up the “lesson.”Explain your idea in next 100 words. Take the time to articulate your ONE IDEA in this section. You want to explain why this blog is about. You want to start to tell your story in the first 100 words. Set up your story within a story. I typically do not jump right into the “business.” Rather, I find my angle and then set up the “lesson.”

• Explain your idea in next 100 words. Take the time to articulate your ONE IDEA in this section. You want to explain why this blog is about. Take the time to articulate your ONE IDEA in this section. You want to explain why this blog is about.Blog relevance in next 100 words. Explain why this idea that you articulated is relevant to the reader. This is the WIIFM moment!

• Provide the blog relevance in next 100 words. Explain why this idea that you articulated is relevant to the reader. This is the WIIFM moment! Explain why this idea that you articulated is relevant to the reader. This is the WIIFM moment!

• Offer your advice in 3 or 5 bullets in penultimate 100 words. Bullets are the best way to clearly community your advice, key takeaways, etc.Recap blog in last 100 words. Take these last 100 words to recap your idea, the benefits of your advice and include a call to action! Bullets are the best way to clearly community your advice, key takeaways, etc.

• Recap blog in last 100 words. Take these last 100 words to recap your idea, the benefits of your advice and include a call to action! Take these last 100 words to recap your idea, the benefits of your advice and include a call to action!

If you have a question about how to start to blog for your business, please leave a comment on this MarketingThink blog post, contact me from this blog comment tab or reach out to me on Twitter at @GerryMoran

Other related blog posts that you might find interesting are:

• SEO & Content Marketing: Pick The Best Words For Your Blog And Site
• 10 Ways To Make Sure Your Blogging Doesn’t Suck
• How To Measure Your Blog’s Success
• Blueprint to the Perfect Blog Post
• How To Optimize Your Blog Traffic

So, blogging is easy. Even easier  than assembling IKEA furniture. Follow the directions above and you can get started in no time. Be brave and blog!

Your phone rings, your Twitter twings, your email dings or your Pinterest pings  … and you have been asked to speak at an event! Whether you are a first-timer on the stage (or virtual podium) one of the first things that come to mind should be self-promotion! I know that that is the case for me! I’ve been asked to speak at Social Media Week in Chicago on September 24-28, 2012 and at the B2B Social Media Summit in Philadelphia on October 9&10, 2012. The first thing that came to mind when asked to be a part of the conference content was … how I self-promote to drive attendance to my event!

The two asks I have received from the conference organizers were:

1. Please send us your bio so we can get your information listed on our sites and blogs
2. Will you help drive awareness of our event by leveraging social media

My first instinct is to how can I leverage more attendance by not just retweeting and reblogging about the event, rather take a bigger discussion item and own it … or at least make it mine for pre-event. I follow the best-practice community- and brand- (i.e., me, the brand) blogging practice of owning the conversation and creation a POV about a topic and you will seek me out with passion vs. waving the sandwich-board to self-promote. I want to be a slightly more provocative and strategic with my branding and promotion.

I understand that there are two goals when leveraging blogging for an event:

• Goal #1: Engage the current registered community audience enough to drive an authentic conversation to drive value-add experience from being a part of the community. Once value is added then event registration to show results such as awareness, registration, touched pipeline and sales will follow as a byproduct

• Goal #1 (yes, two goal #1s): Create content that can be found by non=community  audience from Google searching for solutions (not products) to customer pain points

Blogging is a critical pull-marketing strategy to drive attention, engagement and reader take-action. I reported at my weekly Social Media Office Hours meeting (a center of excellence best practice that SAP NA uses to help activate social media among the marketing stakeholders) that a recent Hubspot State of Inbound Marketing Report shows that 57% of B2B channel users acquired a customer through blogging. Think about it … it’s not the promotional blogs that drive all fo the interaction!

If you are invited to speak at a blog there are two forms that blogs take!

• Form #1: Marketing information. This type of blog posts tells the reader … the who, what, where, why, etc. about an event. If you have ever read an experiened-in-bloggomg organizer’s blog posts that kick off big events, then you know what I mean! This type of information is a valuable read for readers, especially when it’s accessed on their own terms. These posts are tagged in a number of ways where in-community readers will be able to find it easily and outside-community readers will be able to find it with a Google search.

This type of promotional post has a place and a purpose for every event and in every community. Just make sure you make it or it’s made for you in the right place! At SAP we like to use these marketing and sales posts in the section you’re reading right now … Events. Typically this type of post will be taken care of for you! A great way that you can leverage this area as a speaker is to comment on the blog post with a link to your other blog post … about a key point/interesting point of discussion!

• Form #2: Key point / interesting point discussion. This type of blog post takes a big idea, like 5 Key Questions You Need To Ask To About Operational Reporting or How to Answer 10 Big Marketing Questions With One Free Social Media Tool and answers it in a way that promotes discussion but does NOT sell the event or company you represent. The company, product or event sell comes in at the end of the post with a nice wrap-up and outbound link that promotes … if you want to know more, then attend this webinar. This type of blog does double-duty for the the community and the outside community audience. Most of all, it’s providing content that supports the charter of the community – whether it’s your event or your own blog.

So, how do you do operationalize this … meaning, how do you get it done? If you are an organizer looking to recruit a speaker to write a post or if you are a speaker being asked, you should expect this basic process to occur:

• The way in is to ask the speaker “can you write a 500-word post on the 5 key questions a company needs to ask when considering blah blah blah”. It’s easy to overthink this stuff … so don’t. Ask the speaker what he or she thinks about the topic … the real issue, or value, is the topic itself. I mean, “how will operational reporting help your company” vs. “how you can use HANA to do operational reporting” is a great way to look at which will drive more interest. Which one would you be more interested in? (there is an SAP reference here)
• Now, combine that great content with best-practice blog formatting (you know, a great title, keywords, bold subheadings, lists, etc. and you have a magnet for reader! Don’t fret if you are a speaker … your organizer will help you with the formatting and editing.

Good luck with the blogging process! If you ever have a question, I am happy to help!

Gerry Moran