Using Marketo to Promote your Blog

[Anonymous]

I'd like to dive into pushing our company blog to leads using Marketo and I was wondering how others do this. I'm thinking we would be able to get some more feedback/reporting/analytics along with growing our readership.

Any unique and awesome uses, Community Members?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hey Emily,

It seems like you guys write blogs pretty frequently and that's a great start!

We have two separate blogs, one specific to each industry we serve. We're also lucky enough to have dedicated writers on staff who are awesome and really know their stuff.

With that being said, we have a bi-weekly newsletter for each blog that we push to leads with small chunks of the 4 newest blogs (and links to read the full blogs).

This has really worked well for us in driving engagement to our blogs. We've also had people tell us that it's great to get those emails in case they miss a blog or want to go back and read some from the previous week.

Another option that we've had success with is roping in industry experts to do guest blogs and then promoting their involvement to our leads. These experts usually write really engaging content and they can boost your credibility to leads.

Hope these help!

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Caleb. I really like all of those ideas! We have a monthly email that we use to push out our healthcare blog with other curated content, but we struggle to gain interest in it. I think we need to get it more established and make it more prominent. 

It looks like LawLogix has two blogs? How often do you publish to them? Final question, how have you been able to encourage your staff writers and industry experts to contribute?

[Michelle_Tizian]

We have a blog post at least 3 times a week and it's always consistsently delivered at 1 pm and it has an RSS Feed. We have 2 sign-up for the blog at the end of the post, and on the side bar, as well as on the email broadcast footer.  We annouce the blog post on Twitter, Facebook, and on LInkedIn as well.  Anyone who follows us on Twitter, we let them know about our blog. We've also had a guest blogger.  We have at least 7 talented writers who write original stories and do a commentary on other's take on the industry that we write about. 

[Anonymous]

Yes you are correct! Our two products serve very different industries that are somewhat intertwined, but not really at the same time...it's a little complicated! It works well for us to have the two blogs.

I believe each blog shoots for 2 new posts each week with alternating days. So a new blog Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with Friday as the off day.

As far as writers go, we have a dedicated blog writer on staff, so we're pretty lucky in that area 🙂 Guest bloggers are built over time. You might be surprised with the responses you get when reaching out to experts in your industry to write for your blog. You just need to present it as an opportunity for them to build up their status as well. Our writers have relationships with industry experts and we've been doing it for a while now so it's a bit easy for us, but it didn't start that way in the beginning.

The blog started a couple years ago with barely a thousand visits a month and gradually grew into one of the most popular in our industry. I think the most important thing is to be consistent and produce content your readers are interested in. Run polls, have contests-anything to get them engaged and hooked on your content!

We also found blog sites that we could copy/paste/publish our blogs on to reach wider audiences. That really helped us get our name out there.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

Having staff writers would be so amazing. We try to draw from our engineers, which are great resources and experts in the industry, but they are already very overworked and it's a real challenge to get the buy-in from them.

We certainly push our posts through social media, but I think some sort of email would be a good addition too. I also think that we should examine the potential for guest bloggers. Finally, I've looked into trying to turn our posts into guest posts for other blogs that focus on technology within the industries we serve - there's definitely a lot of possibility there and I know I need to take the time to tap into that.

Thank you both so much - this has been very helpful! Share anything else you can think of!

[Michelle_Tizian]

I forgot to mention, our CEO is such a big LinkedIn fan so he posts all of our blog content in all of the 26 industry related groups that he belongs to.  You can also use hubspot's marketing grader it's very helpful to track how your online marketing efforts stack up against the competition. It takes your website's content, social media, blog content, RSS feed into consideration in your overall marketing score. I wish Marketo had such a tool.