ad:tech New York Speaker Interview:
B-to-B Blogging -- Prelaunch Checklist and How to Build Interest

Talking about your latest software upgrade to business customers in new and interesting ways is challenging. Still, Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist for screen capture software firm TechSmith Corp., Okemos, MI, has done just that and has formed an interactive online community via the company’s blog.

Posts in the year-old blog that have been most popular are videos featuring customers’ use of TechSmith’s products. Traffic has been generated outside the site, from mentions in media outlets to related blogs about the way TechSmith features its users. Most traffic comes from Google and bookmarks or feed readers. Some months, more than 75% of the traffic comes from a bookmark or feed reader.

Weber shares nine strategies for launching and maintaining a popular B-to-B blog:

4 Strategies Before Launching a Blog

Strategy #1. Define your blog’s mission.

“You really need to know the goal of your blog and articulate it,” Weber says. “The people you have to sell it to are all about that measurement.” In addition, defining the goal of the blog helps guide the topics you blog about once it’s live.

Strategy #2. Get corporate support from the start

Weber gathered data on successful corporate blogs and campaigned for the formation of a blog months before the launch. “We’re a software company, so I had a lot of examples of other software companies who were doing it and being successful.”

What ultimately convinced the president was when she showed him the amount of traffic being sent to TechSmith’s site from other blogs. She also reminded her bosses that the cost to start and run a blog was minimal. “Very few resources are needed, so the barrier to entry is low.”

Strategy #3. Research how customers want to read your blog.

Do users want blog posts delivered to them via RSS feeds or emailed to them? Do they know what RSS feeds are and how to subscribe to them? You can conduct customer surveys and study the demographics of your customers to determine this.

In Weber’s case, she simply asked clients at trade shows and other meetings if they knew about RSS and how they prefer to receive blog posts. She found that most customers wanted to get their postings via RSS feeds. The RSS page is now the seventh most popular entry page on all of TechSmith’s site, up from No. 12 in January.

Strategy #4. Test an internal blog first.

Before going live to the world, Weber developed an internal blog to see what it would be like for their customers. There, she blogged about customer stories, trade show updates and included pictures and links to education on the site that customers use to learn more about products. “It made the idea tangible and the idea of how a blog could be a natural fit with TechSmith’s customer relations philosophy.”

5 Strategies to Maintain Your Blog

Strategy #1. Subject lines and brief postings.

“You need to make sure you’ve got a great subject line, and in the first few sentences you need to get to the point,” Weber says. Readers want engaging copy but not a novel. Knowing your customer also helps to know how short to keep each post. If they’re reading the blog on their mobile phones or PDAs, as a small portion of TechSmith customers do, the posts must be short and sweet.

Strategy #2. Blog what’s important to customers/readers.

“The customer matters the most. I try to write from the customer’s view, not from the corporate view,” says Weber, who finds out what is important by talking to customers at trade shows, on the telephone, via the blog and during tours of the company.

To build community and interaction, the blog profiles employees at TechSmith, including the developer of a software program and explaining how to use that software. “Everything stems from telling customers a story,” Weber says. Often, she lets software users tell their own story by offering to make videos with them.

“For us, it’s all about community and word of mouth. It’s 100 times better than any advertisement we could buy. We’ve found that the blog brings the kind of people who ‘stick’ to our site: likely the loyal, repeat customer,” Weber says. Most users spend triple the amount of time on the blog than other areas of the site. The number of comments to each post range up to 15.

While TechSmith does not track sales attributed to the blog, Weber has anecdotal evidence that her posts have led to sales and a better understanding of the company’s software products.

Strategy #3. Use lots of visual elements.

Because TechSmith offers visual technology products, Weber includes a picture or video with each post. “I get quite a few emails or comments about [the graphics]. I use them to either show off users, show people from TechSmith, to illustrate a point or to show something in the product.”

Strategy #4. To get consistent traffic, be original.

“You need to write something for yourself,” Weber says. “Don’t just echo what everybody else is saying.”

Different from most corporate posts, she invites customers and anyone reading the blog to tour the company and have lunch with employees. “I had people from Orlando saying they would come to Michigan for a tour.” Then, other bloggers post about her unique offer and link back to her blog.

Before Weber attends a trade show, she uses the blog to encourage customers and others to set up meetings with her. She typically arranges three to 10 meetings per show like that.

Strategy #5. Cross-promote the blog and enewsletters.

While TechSmith has offered monthly enewsletters for years, some customers were not aware of them until Weber posted a video referring to them in her blog. The blog link is included in any email Weber sends out, below her SIG. “We try to send people back and forth between both the blog and newsletter.” However, customers signing up from email are not tracked.

Note: Betsy Weber will be speaking at November’s ad:tech in New York. For information about the upcoming shows, visit http://www.ad-tech.com/

Useful links related to this article:

TechSmith’s Visual Lounge Blog: http://www.techsmith.com/community/bloghome.asp

TechSmith’s Web site:
http://www.techsmith.com