Each and every day thousands of co’s around the world setup their corporate blogs but most of them fail to deliver useful and interesting content. Those who succeed usually tell real life stories instead of posting same old press releases and advertising their products.
Hustling for attention is hard and doing it for your company’s blog seems even harder but there’s a simple set of tips to be used in case you don’t want to waste time and resources on fruitless blogging.
Look around: content is everywhere
One of the most frequent excuses for not blogging we hear from tech co’s is “we don’t have anything significant to blog about”. Half of the startups we meet tend to believe that their potential audience is not interested in posts about anything less than graduating from YC.
It’s sort of true as you should not really pose yourself as a top selling company and try to do Apple-like presentations but there’re multiple other ways to produce interesting content. Just look around – there’s a whole world around you and your company to talk about.
You’ve got a nice office – do a blog post about it. This will not only free you of discussing your product while working in dev mode (or even stealth), lifestyle posts give an insight into your company’s life and humanize the image of it. Even a minimalistic setup can attract like-minded folks, potential co-workers, and confederates.
This is exactly what we suggested for one of our clients – a UX-company (UIDG) and published a post with multiple pics of its office in one of the most visited Russian-speaking tech communities. Juicy pics of their amazing two storey workspace made it resonate with design folks around the world including John Maeda who retweeted it to his 380k followers. This single post got up to 25k views.
Stand out: highlight your unique features
Newcomers face strong competition as they try to enter today's tech market. Early stage products may be relatively hard to market as they often have much more modest feature set compared to their competitors who don’t waste time bragging about their updates here and there.
This is when it’s a good time to look at your product from the jobs-to-be-done point of view and think of its features that may interest particular client (or user) groups. You should highlight these features (or even one single feature) and see how your potential clients react.
Kato.im (team-chat for business) did this exact thing with their Vim-like hotkeys feature and open source projects. This type of posts is something people can profit from and relate to.
Expand your audience: geeks appreciate even non-technical businesses
There's a myth that most of non-technical businesses have nothing special to blog about from a geeky point of view. One of our recent clients is a financial broker firm that had the same perception of tech blogging.
Though it’s pretty obvious that trading is supported by powerful tech solutions and this is pure gold to blog about: IT-infrastructure, trading protocols, trading terminals, trading robots, APIs and even the history of this industry. This particular client (ITinvest) got up to 2m views of its blog posts.
Launch a podcast
Podcasting is about to become a holy grail of content creation allowing you to solve multiple tasks at once: attracting industry experts as co-hosts, generating lifestyle content, serving as the source for an ebook and opportunity to record some videos. This is exactly what we’ve been doing with one of the most popular audio stores in CIS (Audiomania).
Deserve your audience
Here’s one of our favorite quotes by Guy Kawasaki:
“When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight”
Nobody’s interested in your next press release or product video. Put your audience on the first place and try to deliver as much value for them as you possibly can. This way you can understand what they’d really like to get and improve your product, facilitate loyalty and boost sales.