Engaging with customers or potential customers via the social media platforms has changed the way that we advertise and market our company and personal brand. There are conversations taking place 24 hours a day and we are able to capture these conversations and react to them. Your blog is no different. Articles are being read and shared every second of every day. For many small businesses, the blog gets the traffic flowing to the site, a coming attractions of sorts with the website serving as the main event.
In business blogging, we blog to monetize. We publish articles to gain awarness of our offering, offer help, educate and share our knowledge to readers for them to gain trust and ultimtely buy. In a perfect world, we would post a few blogs and have immediate authority and trust and people would buy. This does happen when a brand has previously established themselves in the marketplace (ie iphone, ipad). For the most part, it does not and, as a small business, creating a strategy for your blog will lend itself to converting readers to leads and then sales.
Marketing Strategy for your Blog
To be competitive online you have to develop a winning strategy. Your strategy sets the standards for success. Success is not measured the same for every blog. Each blog has its own goals and objectives and tactics to obtain the objectives which leads to success in achieving the goals. Establishing goals for your blog by creating attainable objectives is just the beginning as once these are in place, how you will go about meeting your goals? The process and the plan that is constructed for the action that will be taken is crucial to the success.
Measuring your Blog’s Success
The success is measured via your objectives which support the goals. Previously we discussed creating strategies and tactics for your blog which outlined the goals, objectives and tactics. In continuing with these goals and objectives, we can now determine how we will measure.
Objective 2: Increase blog subscribers 25% over 6 months.
Strategies:
Create relevant and useful posts that identify with the target audience, helps them and solves their problem.
Read and comment on industry blogs. Include popular, up and coming in popularity and newer blogs to obtain a well rounded audience base.
Delegate the reading and commenting to internal blog contributors with an assigned amount of comments each week.
Promintently display subscribing to the blog.
Promoting post on social media platforms that have been identified as a community building arena for your niche.
Tactics: Designate internal or external consultant to compile list of industry blogs to read and comment upon as well as assist internal employees with their responsibilities, create a call to action at the bottom of each post to encourage subscribing, create profile on social media platforms and share others information (esp. ones you comment on); build a network around you to promote sharing of your posts.
Measurement:
Measurement here is more than checking/monitoring the new subscribers each day. This is very important to keep track of however what is almost more important is listening.
Listening to what people are saying and also how they are reacting. Reacting in terms of subscribing. Listening to what the readers like, expect and trust from you by tracking subscribers per article. Cater your articles around these topics.
Monitor industry conversations via specific topic/subject matter and participate in those conversations accordingly.
Monitor your share of the conversations by analyzing subject-to-brand mentions.
Monitor reach across all platforms via comments, discussions and acceptance across those platforms that matter.
A large amount of retweets is a nice number to look at as is traffic but if they are not subscribing, then the article has not done its job. Not everyone who reads will become a subscriber but if you are getting high traffic numbers and 0 subscriptions the traffic means nothing as it relates to this goal. You may want to consider analyzing the traffic to subscriber percentage so that you can have an idea as to how many visitors convert.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
There are hundreds of social media monitoring tools. Some paid and some free. The free ones like , , Website Grader, Twitter Search, Site Meter are limited but depending upon what your goals and objectives are, they may satsify your needs.
Regarding the paid monitoring tools, Sales Rescue Team has compiled a list of 195 Social Media Tools & Technologies. This is a comprehensive list of the monitoring companies. For a deeper look into some of the companies, Katie Van Domelen provides some insight in Social Media Monitoring Tools – How to Pick the Right One over at Convince and Convert.
Measurement is necessary in social media. Measurement has to be applied to goals and objectives and is not an overall numbers game.
How are you measuring the success of your blog?
photo credit: vintagegoodness