I recently did an interview with Marcus Sheridan, one of the real leaders and evangelists for content marketing.
Although my interview with Marcus was focused on the industrial market, we were able to have some private conversations before and after my on-camera interview while in Kalamazoo.
As many of you, I have watched several of Marcus’s presentations and admired his success, particularly the way he turned around his, “really boring”, pool company by simply blogging. His formula for success was extremely simple.
“They Ask, You Answer”
In other words, no matter how boring your product or service, there are folks on the web that are interested in your company. Whether you sell fancy software, swimming pools, home mortgages, hydraulic manifolds or carbide taps…someone is interested and has a question.
So Marcus started blogging at River Pools & Spas Oh…where to begin? Marcus simply wrote down all the questions he had received from customers over the years.
What do you think the number one question customers had about swimming pools? Costs…of course. Duh!
So…when Marcus and I visited in Kalamazoo he told me he enjoyed my blog and thought the content was right on for the industrial marketer…but told me to start writing about the costs of an “industrial web site”, “industrial web marketing”, “digital marketing for industrial”, etc.
So, I spent a spent a lot of time assembling all the information about industrial internet marketing and the real costs of a successful web strategy, not just a web site, for an industrial marketer.
Frankly, I probably spent over 8 hours putting this post together. I had several experts proof it and double checked the numbers & references to make sure they were accurate.
Finally, I posted the blog on April 8th, 2014 while on vacation in Florida overlooking the beach. This was the longest post I had written and it came with a warning:
“WARNING: This post is just over 2000 words. However, this is valuable information if you are considering investing in a new web site for your B2B industrial company.”
In good SEO practice, I titled the blog post, “How Much Does an Industrial Web Site Really Cost?”
In just one week my blog post had achieved the following results for these keyword phrases:
“How much does an industrial web site cost?” Number ONE in Google
“What is the cost of an industrial web site”? Number TWO in Google
“Industrial web site costs” Number THREE in Google
Notice how I pulled people in by using “costs”, but nudged them to think farther down the road and to think about strategy and generating revenue from their web site. Blogging for the industrial marketer works.
For B2B lead generation…blog about your product’s costs. I don’t care what your “boring” industrial product is, starting blogging about costs.
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