The importance of blogs within the Travel Industry is set to increase over the next few years. Changes in the way content is aggregated across search engines and social media will push companies towards placing blogs and social networking at the forefront of their online marketing strategies.
Whether you have a blog already or you’re thinking about integrating one, this article aims to give you crucial insights into using corporate blogging as an incredibly powerful marketing tool.
Here are our 7 essential tips to corporate blogging:
Step 1 - Choose your blog platform
There’s a wide variety of choice out there when it comes to blogging platforms. We recommend Wordpress, which offers many thousands of easy to use plugins for bespoke functionality. The blog should ideally be integrated into your website as a Sub Domain (e.g. http://www.mytravelagency.com/blog). Other blogging platforms to consider might be Drupal, Typepad or Expression Engine.
Step 2 - The Content Strategy
Many blogs fail because they have been insufficiently planned. A content strategy should essentially lists out; who is going to write editorial, how the blog will be promoted, principal topics, content ideas, regularity of content posting, which other blogs to align with, what keywords are to be targeted. Read on and this will make more sense!
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A detailed look at the alarming trend in bloggers charging PRs for exposure.
We recently undertook an online PR campaign for a prominent fashion brand, the task to seed a movie teaser around a new collection being launched. The movie was good, inspiring and on the whole, better than the vast majority you typically find in YouTube’s vaults!
Over the past 3 years we’ve been responsible for successfully promoting over 30 viral movies and have been noticing an increasingly alarming trend when it comes to around 50% of bloggers reaction to seeding…!
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So… you’ve decided to embrace social media for all it is, starting with your own corporate blog that’s going to drive you tons more traffic, increase conversions/enquiries, and catapult the company firmly into the future of communications.
BUT you need to decide who’s going to write the thing… your time as a business owner or marketer is too valuable to spend on something with mid-longer term ROI so you have to consider handing over the reins to a colleague (who is just as busy) or outsourcing to a professional agency who can generate the best possible returns for you.
Well, if you are considering getting the troops in the office to do it you may want to read the below, then consider why it’s really not such a great idea to keep it in house:
Too much personality
Expressing personality on your blog is a good thing right? Yes, but too much of it can actually damage your brand. Consider for a moment why you decided to set up a blog in the first place – engage with your prospects, suppliers, clients… and anyone else who happens to come across your brand. If they read something that is potentially a little too friendly, edgy or uneducated then it will reflect on your brand, NOT the individual who wrote it. Without guidelines and rules you’re in danger of wasting your time, money and risking your brand name.
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If your company has decided to make the move into the world of social media marketing then you’re in the minority and likely to out-compete your competitors who haven’t.
If you are in this minority then hopefully you’ve researched or better still, implemented a corporate blog either as a sub domain, on a separate domain or within your own spoofy content management system.
Here are 3 easy to follow essential tips for promoting your corporate blog:
Make your articles work harder
Twitterfeed - Start by adding your blogs RSS feed to Twitterfeed. This will allow you to automatically ‘tweet’ your blog article titles to your twitter and Facebook followers. There’s no cost to this and you’ll find you collect loads more ‘followers’ who are looking for content around what you are publishing.
Pro-active promotion – Set yourself a target of promoting at least one article every week or fortnight to other relevant blogs and websites in your space. Identify 20 or so relevant sites and simply email them with a brief synopsis and link, telling them why you feel it’s relevant and worth featuring on their site.
Keyword optimised titles – If you want to get found on the search engines then you need to integrate keywords and phrases into your titles and within your main article body copy. A great free tool to use to identify suitable phrases is Google’s keyword tool.
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A recent survey carried out by PR firm Burson-Marsteller has revealed that 79% of Fortune 500 companies have integrated social media into their marketing strategy. The preferred mediums of choice are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.
This diagram shows the breakdown across continents:
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