Creating a Company Culture of Blogging

Every marketing best practice guide advises that as a business, if you aren’t blogging, you will get left behind by your competitors. If you Google “business blogging,” you’ll get thousands of, you guessed it, blogs about why your company should be publishing content on your website every day. As a company, WSOL truly put some thought and energy into blogging this year. We’re a little behind the curve, but hey, we focus 150% our company efforts on creating success for our clients and have had incredible referral based growth for the past 10 years, so spending time on curating and developing content for our site was a low priority until now.

WSOL has actively been developing a company culture surrounding blogging. Our goal is for everyone to be excited about writing blogs as they are about our free lunches on Wednesdays. With that goal in mind, we have done a couple of things this year that has resulted in over 60 blogs ready to be published and over 100 content ideas waiting to be written.

In this two part blog, I’ll share our ideas and success with the project we have been calling Blogapalooza 2013.

Teaching the “Why” of Blogging

Our first step was to educate our employees – everyone - from Sales and IT to Client Services. With a little food-based motivation, our company-wide “Breakfast and Blogs” meeting focused on sharing why as a company we needed to start blogging more and what we were hoping to accomplish.

So why should WSOL blog anyways?

Visibility

Referrals and word of mouth from happy clients have always been our main source of new business. It’s something we’re incredibly proud of as a company. That being said, we also knew that Inbound Marketing was a lead generation practice that we had to fully implement internally. This would help us be able to better support our clients that wanted to grow their own business by focusing on creating content to attract new site visitors and nurture prospects along the buying journey. In order to help them do this, one of the best things we could do was lead by
example and start publishing new content regularly on our website.

SEO

Secondly,business blogging helps with search engine optimization (SEO). The more blog posts that are published, the more indexed pages are created for search engines to display in their results. Business blogging helps us rank in search engines and get found when people search for our industry-specific products or services. Blogs allow us to attract organic traffic and familiarize people with our business and services.

Thought Leadership

Blogs are an asset that introduces not only our company, but our employees as thought leaders. While there are many examples in our industry, I shared this quote from Jeff Bullas¹, a thought leader on social medial and online marketing: “You build an online personal and thought leadership brand by the consistent creation of multi-media content”. His blog receives over 4 million page views per year and is read in 190 countries. Jeff’s blog is ranked #14 in the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers by Forbes.com. He knows what he’s doing and was a great example to share with our employees.

So, how do we become Thought Leaders through Blogs?

1. By earning trust through our content – our content should be focused on the client, not the business.
2. Educating our site visitors– we would love it if everyone that visited our website was ready to redesign their site, invest in a CMS, or host with us. But the reality is, the majority of our site visitors are researching solutions to their business problems. By providing content that educates and shows how problems can be solved, we can keep visitors engaged with us and keep WSOL in their minds when they are ready to make that buying decision.

Lead Generation

Blogs give us real estate on our site to place calls to action in order to generate leads.It gives us a place to tell a story about WSOL beyond just a listing of services. Through blogs, we aim to retain our site visitors and encourage them to engage further with the site content. This is truly the power of inbound marketing, and something we had not yet perfected internally.

Show Me the Data

As with any digital company, our data geeks always need numbers to convince them, especially if we were asking them to write!

Here’s what we shared:

According to a HubSpot research study², based on data from 7,000 of their customers:

• Nearly 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes
• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors
• B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads per month than those that don’t
• B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads per month than those that don’t

How about stats from WSOL blog efforts to date?

• We increased our site visitors by 195% in the first 6 months of blogging
• We’ve increased our inbound links by 350%
• One blog post was viewed by over 17,000 people worldwide.

Blogapalooza 2013

Our next step in creating a company culture of blogging has been content creation and a company-wide writing effort. The details of both of those efforts will be written up in, yes, another blog. For now, how has your company approached your blogging strategy? Do you have one? Have you seen success? WSOL is committed to helping our clients’ websites be a key part of their business growth. We’d love to talk to you about it!

References

1. Jeff Bullas

2. HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000 Businesses