Marketing and Sales Education Center

We here at Evenstar often get asked by companies about how they can improve the performance of their business blogging. Although they do have blogs, they find the results underwhelming: the volume of website traffic is lower than desired, and they generate little to no buzz through blog subscriptions, RSS feeds, or on social media.  

Many traditional marketers are concerned that when it comes to writing blog articles the content has to be considerably different among the. They worry that too much repetition in the same theme is detrimental to their brand.  They ask: "Doesn't this week's post seem too similar to that post we did a few weeks ago?". Sometimes marketers are so close to these products that they are afraid of repeating themselves and ask for suggestions to help the posts stand out a little more. For example, a business has two brand names for the same product; a suggestion is adding the product name in the blog title and throughout the blog to differentiate it.  Otherwise, it will remain essentially the same blog, and that is fine in this instance.

If you've been doing even a little reading about internet marketing and blogging in particular, you have no doubt heard the term "CONTENT IS KING".  This means that the content of your blog is what will get you found on internet searches.  If we follow this train of thought, then it means your blog should have content that your customers are searching for.  In other words, content that they will find useful.

The recent changes to the Google search algorithms have now made it essential to publish content on the web.  It is no longer acceptable from a search engine standpoint to develop static web pages about your company's products or services, stuff them with a bunch of keywords, and stand back and wait for an avalanche of traffic and leads to come to your website.

Many business owners think there are a whole host of ways to increase business and fuel their growth. Some thnk that having a great product is the only thing you need. If you build a better moustrap they will come. That may work for Apple, but more often than not, that strategy fails.

The scientific community, it seems, is beginning to embrace social media as a way of improving dialogue and communication.  To the general public, the scientific community has seemed like an impenetrable fortress of scientific terminology, jargon and very complex concepts.  We wanted to understand the research more, but we were hopelessly lost when we tried to find out more about the great scientific breakthroughs we hear about. 

Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures.  That was the dilemma Zeller's, a Canadian discount retailer, found itself in last year.  Zeller's had just announced that it was going out of business and had sold many of its store leases to U.S. giant Target.  Zeller's found itself trying to sell much of its inventory with very little marketing budget.  Faced with a very restricted budget - $400,000 vs. the $20 million marketing budget of other big retailers - Zeller's could not do the traditional TV, radio and print advertising campaigns for its final pitch.  It still had to continue to sell product for months to come and do so profitably.