The Case for Company Blogs

Some time ago, Hubspot published a report on the state of inbound marketing that suggests companies that blog, get more consistent sales. The survey found that from the 231 marketers involved with the report, those that blog frequently were the ones who kept a more consistent hold on customer acquisition. Businesses that spend 50% or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 60% less per lead than businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on outbound channels, which means inbound marketing channels are maintaining their low-cost advantage.

Graph from Hubspot.

The report also reveals better rates of customer acquisition depending on how frequently you blog: 100% of respondents who said they blog multiples a day found customers from their blog, compared to 90% of those who blog daily and 69% of who blog a few times weekly.

While blogging clearly brings about better and more direct means of engagement between customer and company, there are a few add-ons we can include that aren’t discussed in the report.

We can learn three things:

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Build Trust Through Content Marketing

Every brand or company prizes one thing in a customer: trust. With trust comes brand loyalty and consistent word-of-mouth marketing, but how do you build up that trust? Customer service is one way, but that’s only the beginning.

Through content marketing, a brand instantly opens up more channels and new ways of sharing stories with their customers. This more personal and ‘off-the-record’ style of communication allows the customer to see the face beyond the product. Content like this can be distributed on a blog post, an email newsletter, Youtube, or social networks. This quality content isn’t aimed at making the sale, but rather to entertain, inform and assist your customer.

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Marketing in 2012: It’s Responsive, Personalized, and Measurable

John Wanamaker famously remarked:

Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

Fortunately, marketers in 2012 should no longer find themselves sharing the same quandary as Mr Wanaker as it will be possible to get the answer through three key moves in consumer marketing technology.

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Marketing in the Interaction Rich World – an idio interview with David Barrow

We caught idio Ltd. Chairman David Barrow for some words on marketing in the interaction rich world. David has more than 20 years’ experience in the  customer prediction and marketing fields, and previously was the founder and CEO of KiQ. KiQ went on to transform the intelligent CRM and CEM market, before being acquired by Chordiant.

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The Challenge of Real-time Content Marketing Automation

The accepted practice for digital marketing, even for what has been called Marketing Automation, has been a selection process, where a message is chosen or written, a customer segment is chosen (perhaps based on their last response or purchasing power), and then when the message is delivered to the customer segment, an overall conversion rate is captured (and increasingly, individualised conversion rates).

This process works. It certainly works a lot better than when every message is sent to everyone. Or when no analytics, or only overall analytics are captured. But it doesn’t reflect the sophisticated nature of modern content ubiquity, transient customer behaviour, and analytical depth.

These three elements of any marketing process (actually they are the same three elements for customer service), have traditionally been seen as dots. Static. This has been a necessary simplification. In reality, they are lines; streams of data. Fully dynamic. Ebbing and flowing every day.

idio content helix

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