Always Be Publishing

You’ve probably heard the sales-related acronym ABC. It stands for Always Be Closing and was made famous by the pre-bloated, pre-funny Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Well I’ve created a new acronym, this one for content marketing: ABP. No, that doesn’t stand for Au Bon Pain. It stands for Always Be Publishing. Never has it been more important for organizations that use the web to find, engage and keep customers to be publishers—and regular ones at that.

I’ve long believed in the power of blogs to enhance an organization’s reputation and get more people interested in buying a product or utilizing a service, but now there’s real data and compelling facts to back up my somewhat ardent infatuation.

A couple weeks ago, Boston content marketing company Hubspot published a great study that revealed the real power of publishing as marketing tool. Among the tasty nuggets in the report:

Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all.

Think about that for a second. If, every other day, you or someone in your organization were to write an interesting, relevant, timely post about a topic of interest to your (potential) customers, your web traffic would increase significantly.

Increased web traffic doesn’t necessarily equal increased business, you say. To which Hubspot says:

You could say that inbound leads aren’t the same as new business, to which I’d say, “Now you’re just being stubborn. Maybe you’ll listen to the Googlebots.”

As I wrote about last month, Google has changed its algorithm so content with a lot of social shares comes up higher in searches than content that has been through the SEO song and dance. (Quote is from forbes.com’s excellent “The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content.”)

Here’s how the author of the post, Ken Krogue, put it:

Google decided to change the weight of their emphasis from “backlinks” more towards social media likes, shares, tweets, reddits, and 1+. In the world of digital media the emphasis is on follows, comments, and views as well.

Taken together, the Hubspot study and the Forbes.com article make a compelling case for brands as regular publishers of content that people want to share with those in their networks.

What content do your (potential) customers want from you? I have no idea. But you do, or someone in your organization does. Write and publish something about an important strategic topic for your organization and see if it gets any traction. If it doesn’t, keep writing and publishing. If it does, look closely at what people responded to, what they commented on, what they shared…then do it again. And again.

Content marketing isn’t a silver bullet, but what makes it powerful, what makes it valuable is that it lets people know who you are, what you’re good at and—most importantly—how you can help them.

So get out there and remember: ABP!

 

 

 

 

Categories: Content marketing, Social media and blogging