There are many benefits to blogging. From a database marketing perspective, blogging provides a streamlined platform for you to reach a targeted audience – those visiting your website – about relevant topics such as common technical challenges and technology trends. This content can build credibility and interest in your company and products. A lesser-known fact, however, is that you can use your blog as an email marketing tool by pushing it directly to subscribers’ email.

Here are 3 tips to improve the reach and quality of your blog:

1. The Feedburner widget
2. Creating quality content
3. Reaching your target audience

1. The Feedburner widget – You can use tools such as Feedburner, a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account and then follow their instructions to set up a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog (see top right of page for example). Readers who subscribe will receive each new blog post that you publish as an email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox and giving them the opportunity with each new post to click through to your site.

2. Creating quality content – A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch. It should be a way to show your customers and prospects that you are knowledgeable, you understand the challenges and solutions of specific applications, and you provide effective results.

3. Reaching your target audience – Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. As you establish the foundational marketing outlined in this white paper, and you expand into areas such as social media, your blog can also be a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on) point. This not only drives traffic to your blog, but also gets prospects to your website where they can interact with other information including your products, case studies, and white papers.

For more helpful tips on direct marketing, you can download our free guide, Smart Marketing for Engineers.

The five-word phrase has come up in marketing discussions in every company across America: “We should start a blog.”

Marketers smile. A new vehicle to reach our audience. Sounds great.

PR professionals cheer. A low-cost way to specifically explain our business! Let’s do it!

Executives and engineers cringe. Waste precious time on blog posts, only to get lost in the information overload that is the Internet? No, thank you.

The last thing that TREW Marketing will advocate for is wasted time, but, one of the first things that TREW Marketing will advocate for is a clearly communicated message to your target audience.

Creating Quality Content

Blogging allows for a streamlined platform where companies can talk to a targeted audience about industry challenges and trends in order to advocate for their company and products.

For example, we can use content that we have put together over time on the TREW Spotlight blog to show you best practices in print advertising, email marketing, style guides, pay-per-click advertising, and public relations. This content doesn’t talk directly about TREW products and services; instead, our blog provides best practices and talks about industry challenges, solutions and trends. A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch, it should be a way to show your customers and prospective customers that you know what you’re talking about, that you understand the challenges and solutions of the industry, and that you provide measureable results.

Reaching Your Target Audience

Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. The blog is a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) point, so that when someone engages with your tweet or Facebook update, they are directed to your blog, where they can find more information than what can be expressed in 140 characters, and can interact with the rest of your site, including your products, case studies, whitepapers, etc.

The TREW Spotlight blog.

A lesser-known fact about blogs is that you can use your blog to get your content directly to your audience through their email, like a basic e-Newsletter with a simple format, using a service like Feedburner. Feedburner is a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account, and then follow the instructions to setup a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog.

The Feedburner widget.

Readers who subscribe will now receive each new blog post that you publish via email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox, and giving them the opportunity with each new post/email to click through to your site. If you’re interested in Feedburner, you can read more about how to use the service.

If you’ve visited the Google search page today, you probably noticed some big changes. Google has updated their look with a new left-hand side panel which offers search tools to help customize and refine results. more…

December is here and will quickly fly by.  If you have marketing budget dollars to spend before the year’s end, you are feeling the pressure.  We’ve put together a list of quick, effective marketing investments for you to consider.

1.  Invest in Google Adwords.  Not only are Adwords ideal for reaching a very specific audience, and easy to measure; you can have them live within 24 hours using your corporate credit card.  Be sure to follow best practices — see our Spotlight blog post on this topic for more details.

2.  Reach out to your database. Send an end-of-year email to your customers and prospects.  Be sure the message is not too sales-oriented…offer valuable information such as tech tips and industry news.  Or simply say thank you for their business.  Have not been keeping up with your database?  Use December to update your records, determine ways to segment your target audiences, and perhaps begin plans for a 2010 quarterly newsletter.

3.  Start a blog. December is a great time to set up the back-end mechanics of your new company blog (which would launch in 2010).  These include creating a WordPress account and feeding that account into your website.  Your blog should match the look and feel of your website, which likely means a small amount of creative work.

4.  Refresh content on your website. Conduct a head-to-toe sweep of your website, updating messages and improving your writing (active voice, tighten phrases, etc.).  While looking through your site, uncover lead acquisition opportunities, such as existing white papers and presentations, and post them behind short forms for web visitors to complete.  TREW Marketing writers/editors can be a great resource for this work.

5.  Thank your staff. Has your team gone above and beyond to meet their goals this year?  Be sure they are recognized for their efforts.  This can range from the very simple, such as bringing in bagels and coffee for a surprise treat, to gift certificates or a formal holiday/appreciation event.  An appreciated team will be a motivated team for you in 2010.

6. Gather 2010 marketing plan feedback from an expert. This is an ideal time to bring in a TREW Marketing consultant as a sounding board for your 2010 plans.  During the one or two-day session, we review goals, major marketing campaigns, core messages, and investment by media.  We uncover ways to strengthen your messages, integrate innovative marketing tactics, and measure impact and success.

Contact TREW Marketing and put your December and 2010 marketing plans in motion.

Recently, I was asked to present to a group of United Way volunteers about the basics of social media (SM) and advise them how best to take advantage of these new tools to further their mission and achieve their goals. So I thought I’d share a snapshot of my presentation here.

If you are actively using SM tools and have integrated them into your overall marketing strategy and plan, then this will likely be too basic for you. However, we have found that many are still struggling with what exactly all these tools are and how they can best be used to help achieve business and marketing goals. If you are in this latter group, maybe the information here will be helpful.

To start, one of the biggest challenges with SM is just trying to figure out what functionality these tools provide and how to effectively use them. As you can see from this image, there are hundreds, if not thousands, to choose from.

Three of the most common SM tools that I will focus on here are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In this post, I’ll talk about Facebook and Twitter. In the second, I’ll provide an additional Twitter case study, talk about LinkedIn, and then summarize with our recommendations on how best to take advantage of these tools to meet your goals.

So, let’s start with Facebook . Facebook is a free-access social networking application used by over 200 million users globally. In order to connect with people on Facebook, you have to “friend” them (yes, the noun just became averb) and they have to “accept” you as a friend. Once you are connected, you can begin networking: see their activity, who else they’re friends with, comment back on their updates, etc. Some cool features of Facebook include the ability to posts websites, images, and video right on your page. This is an important point and distinction from an environment such as email or even other SM environments, where you have to click on a link and go to another site to view it. On Facebook, it serves it all up right there on your page.

Another cool feature of Facebook is the ability to “become a fan” of pages. They could be company pages, cause-oriented campaigns, Hollywood stars, etc. This is not only fun for users to “become a fan” of groups they are associated with, care about, and/or want to promote to their friends, but they can be a very effective way for organizations and businesses to create an online community where they can keep users, donors, and constituents up to date on the happenings of the group. You can efficiently feed content to your Facebook fan page by linking it with your organizations’ blog, so blog posts automatically feed into your Facebook page.

Similar to fan pages, nonrprofits can create Cause pages that users can join. With Cause pages, interested users can join and thereby encourage their friends to learn more and join as well. While these Cause pages have not shown success in actually raising dollars for nonprofits, they can quickly and efficiently raise awareness and visibility of the work of the organization in a cost-effective manner. There are many more features of Facebook, and new applications introduced daily. We strongly recommend a serious evaluation of Facebook for your department, product, individual brand, or company/organization for these and many other benefits.

Secondly, let’s look at Twitter, which is a free-access microblogging SM networking tool. The essence of Twitter is short 140 character “tweets” very similar to the updates in Facebook. You can use tools such as TweetSync to have your tweets automatically feed into your Facebook page. Unlike Facebook, where you can only talk to “friends” who’ve accepted you, you can “follow” anyone on Twitter whether they reciprocate or not – ie, you can follow others even if they don’t follow you. Also unlike Facebook, Twitter provides great search ability and can be a very effective tool for quick research. As a simple example, a few weeks ago, I was trying to compress a video and having trouble. I sent a tweet out to ask if anyone had advice, and using TweetSync, had it also appear on my Facebook page. Literally within minutes, I had two responses – one on Facebook from a personal friend and one on Twitter from someone I had never met. I had my problem solved almost immediately.

There are many, many tips to effectively using Twitter and many perceived “rules” that you don’t necessarily need to follow. While I won’t go into all them here, a critical practice to using Twitter successfully is setting expectations for what your followers can expect from the specific account. For example, Dell Outlet uses their Twitter account exclusively for sharing deals on Dell equipment. That’s it. They don’t follow others, they don’t mix up the content of their tweets to be funny jokes, personal stories, and business information. They share great deals, and that’s it. And if the number of followers is any indication, it’s working. When I checked today, they had 583,428 followers. And how many do they follow, you may ask? 23 users.

Twitter is a very fast-growing, popular SM tool. In fact, Twitter saw 1M new users in December 2009 alone, and as of this presentation in early May, had a total of 4.3 M users according to mashable.com, including many stars, politicians, and some of the most well-known brands. We see huge potential for businesses and individuals to leverage Twitter for their business and marketing goals.

Look for the next post to cover another Twitter case study, a brief overview of LinkedIn, and a wrap up with our recommendations for how best to leverage SM tools to meet your business objectives.