Your blog could be your B2B’s new & improved “front door”

We’ve been preaching the virtues of a corporate blog for B2Bs for over 3 years now …as recently as early last month, pointing out the beneficial effect of a blog on your primary website’s search engine results page rankings.

Those of you who saw the light, got on board early and now have a company blog running may have noticed some of the effects described by Sean Donahue, posting on the SherpaBlog. Though not formal Sherpa research, Sean of course speaks frequently with many B2B marketers, and recently was surprised to hear from those with established blogs that their blogs were now outpacing their company homepages for such key metrics as:

• Total visits
• Time spent on site
• Number of pages viewed

Sean’s post goes into some detail on the experiences of email service provider Delivra, whose Marketing Director – Carissa Newton – shared these statistics…

• They’re now seeing 4 times more blog traffic than website traffic.
• Visitors are staying 3-4 times longer to read blog content, plus website links included in those blogposts.

In fact, Delivra has jumped more than 20 pages in Google search results for key phrases such as “email marketing” since starting its concerted blogging and social media effort.  And since last October, the team has seen a 70% increase in inbound leads.

Carissa outlined three secrets to the success of Delivra’s blog:

#1.  Recruit multiple bloggers
Rather than rely on one overloaded individual, Delivra uses a team of 9 or10 people in the company (plus outside guest bloggers …including customers), each of whom is committed to doing a post on some regular interval.  Aside from assuring a sufficient flow of posts, this approach also increases the blog’s breadth and depth of expertise, making it attractive to a larger audience.

#2. Enforce regular posting
By now, we all know that spotty, catch-as-catch-can posting is the kiss of death for a corporate blog.  Carissa avoided this trap by getting Delivra’s CEO on board, who mandated that the blog be posted five times a week …and has also led by example by contributing a post himself each Monday!

#3. Share metrics and reward success
Carissa also uses carrots to supplement the stick.  Early on, she ran contests to recognize the blogger whose post was shared the most, and used gift-card rewards for the most successful posts.  Now, it’s enough to share the metrics resulting from the team’s efforts, showing the rest of the company how important their contributions are.

We’ll close this with a couple of nuggets from the 20+ comments to Sean’s post…

Our customer – HealthCorp Solutions – has maintained a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for several months now, and has been able to track organic traffic spikes from search engines on a predictable time delay. – EnClave Social Media

Our agency, TopRank Marketing, was virtually unknown until we started blogging.  Now we get new project inquiries, speaking engagements, press mentions, job inquiries and even advertising requests just about every day. – Lee Odden