Blogging as part of your content marketing strategy

Blogging as part of your content marketing strategy.
John Watton, CMO, ShipServ
28 April, 2010

I will cover…
A bit about ShipServ
What we did
Why we did it
How we did it
5 Lessons Learned

A bit about ShipServ
E-marketplace. $1.5bn in GMV per annum
Connect buyers & sellers of commercial ship supplies
Flexible monetisation model
Some Freemium elements
Buyer Subscriptions
Seller listings and advertisements
Go-to-market approach
Regional direct sales (10+)
Philippines-based telesales team (50+)

The challenge
Micro-multinational (160 employees in 6 locations)
Serve a global, fragmented business community.
Risk averse, conservative audience
No competition = have to educate the industry = nurture
Need to move from broadcast to conversation
Shift of features from software to users

What's your view of Social Media and its role in the shipping business?
Source: ShipServ e-commerce survey, April 2010

Content marketing defined
Content marketing is turning your insight and advice into campaigns that change people’s minds and incite action

My goal
FROM
Impersonal
Shout
Sell
Persuade
Instruct
Product Vendor
Promote
TO
Personality
Listen
Nurture
Participate
Inspire
Trusted service
Entertain
From “We USE ShipServ” to “We’re MEMBERS OF ShipServ”

Creating the right content
Has to pass a higher bar than ever before
What passes that test?
Information that a buyer believes will
Save a fortune
Make a fortune
Keep him in his job
Keep him out of jail

Our content marketing plan v1.0
Content and micro-content around calendared themes
Promote and distribute the content through low cost online media – especially social media like LinkedIn and feeding the Twitter account with blog posts, social releases, etc.
SEO keyword planning and site and landing page optimization
Creating a LinkedIn Group as a community hub and encouraging membership
Exploitation of five other maritime groups on LinkedIn (who together have over 11,000 members)
Viral videos to lighten the conversation
Marketo lead nurturing and lead scoring to track visitor behaviour and create sales-ready leads

Our content marketing plan v2.0
Started with big themes & campaigns
PLUS quickly incorporated
Short company news & updates
Pimping our own content
“Bigging up” customers, partners, etc
“Come and meet us”
“Hey we’re people just like you”

Before

Publish once & keep our own “dial tone”
RSS
twitter
web
facebook
Linkedin

Take the pain out of newsletters

“Splash and drip” – using blogs in lead nurturing
Newsletter
eBook
Blog
……Tip #2………#3……...#4…...…#5…...…#6…..…#7….…#8..…..
Tip #1
Tip #9
12 month campaign
April 09
May 09
March 09
Promotion & download
Lead nurturing
Lead scoring
Sales intelligence

Guidelines?
socialmediagovernance.com/MSFT_Social_Media_Policy.pdf

Getting help
A good agency can help keep a blog on track -- but expect the core stuff to be from your core team (we do)
Journalist freelancer can be good. After all it's a journalistic medium...

The benefits
Thought leadership – the core of our TL program
Speed – to respond to timely stuff
Informality – lets us relax our voice
Engagement – elicits comment & feedback
Distance – ability to get a bit of separation from the corporate storyline
Connectedness – ease of linking to (and co-opting) anything on the web
Social Media fodder – something to tweet or link to from LinkedIn, etc
SEO mojo

3,321 people have read our blog in the 12 months up to April 2010
READERS
Weeks

5 Lessons Learned

1. People are people

2. Go micro

3. Get into a routine

4. Re-pimp your content

5. Be authentic

Thank You
jwatton@shipserv.com / @jwatton

Blogging as part of your content marketing strategy

by John Watton on Jun 17, 2010

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Blogging as part of your content marketing strategy — Presentation Transcript