The Value a Blog Brings To Your Brand

While in San Francisco this past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a conference, WordCamp San Francisco. I didn’t sit in on that many sessions, for a variety of reasons, but there was one that I attended, mostly because I know the speaker and he delivers a good and impactful talk – Chris Lema.

His talk was on Building Your Brand with a Blog – yes I stole the concept for the post title from that.

He defined 6 key elements to a successful content marketing strategy:

• Audience
• Needs
• Opinion
• Consistency
• Tone
• Sharing

If you have never heard my Chilean friend talk, you really need to, oh and don’t worry you have a lot of opportunities to. I encourage you to grab a glass of your favorite drink and go through the various videos, he’s a phenomenal speaker, and he writes about it too. But look, this post isn’t about my friend, it is however about his 6 key points.

Building a Content Marketing Strategy

If you would have asked me 6 months ago, my strategy to marketing would have been, “Not my area, sorry, bro!”

You see, my focus was operations. I was responsible for building teams, ensuring our survivability through our ability to scale. And yet, like most entrepreneurs when things change, you too must adjust. This is where I found myself, trying to navigate this new world of marketing. What I knew was that we had a brand, and that brand had a very clear voice, yet it felt as if was slightly off. It felt as if we’d been dabbling in too much, and in some instances not dabbling enough.

Up until this weekend, my sphere around content marketing would have focused on the following:

• Audience
• Consistency
• Sharing

After hearing the talk though, I’ll be expanding my strategy to include additional elements:

• Needs
• Opinion
• Tone

I had always defined, perhaps poorly so, that I knew better the needs of my audience. I was ignoring what that audience really craved, the tricky part being how diverse my audience[s] is.

I also had mixed opinions about opinion. I kept thinking that opinion was best left out of the discussion, to avoid confusion or introducing bias, but then I realize our opinions are really what set us apart. In reality, many come to your property because of an opinion, while many will form their own, many more require you to connect the dots sometimes.

Tone on the other hand is something I’ve never fallen short of, it’s often been very easy to feel and appreciate the tone in the things my properties release. With me it’s always been a love / hate relationship, either you like my approach or you don’t, either way you know when I’m talking.

These 6 elements might appear simple, but they will become the foundational elements of the marketing strategy my team will be putting together for my company.

CEO’s Successfully Blogging To Reach Audience

How appropriate that while I was thinking about this post, I came across this post on The @Steveology Blog in which they write about CEO’s writing and sharing their experiences writing more.

The blog, a social media tool, serves as an introductory method to start that connection with buyers and customers, and can be a great place to showcase expertise, share information, and give advice.

I wonder if this will be something we see more of, especially in younger, more socially engaged organizations. If you look at more traditional businesses, you rarely see CEO’s of large organizations sharing their opinions and engaging solely, it’s no wonder why, a good friend once told me, “Executives usually get in trouble when they go off script.”

It’s curious though, when define your content strategy, how do you not account for your leaderships voice?

Maybe it’s just easier for us small businesses to do, and the argument is simply that as you get bigger you really have no time, but I truly hope that’s not the case. I can personally tell you that I have had several things to write about in the recent months, years really, and what’s held me back is the perceived sensitivity of the information.

…underlying want to provide something of value to others and to share what they know…

I’m a firm believer though in one thing, it really doesn’t matter how much you share or how much you provide around insights to your strategy. The single differentiating factor, is not the idea, but the ability to execute, the ability endure the grind.

Let us now succumb to the top four stupid reasons people don’t blog:

1. No one wants to hear what I have to say
2. I have nothing to say
3. I might say something wrong
4. I’m not a writer

Can you really share what’s on your mind? I suppose the answer to that is really, it depends.. I can’t help but think that most people will be very curious, and so I’ll embark on that journey across my various properties.