Make Your Blog a Hub for Content Marketing

As a marketer, I love great visuals. Recently, ELOQUA and JESS3 released their new Content Grid v2. This infographic highlights which online tools marketers use to reach out to prospects. There are several ideas in this infographic that should be carefully considered:

1.       The purpose of marketing is to move prospects along a hierarchy of behavior from awareness to consideration to an actual purchase

2.       Different prospects have different goals as they move through this hierarchy

3.       Marketers have a complex set of tools to wield as they try to help prospects move through this hierarchy

But, there is one overarching idea that I’d like to point out as a marketer of blogging software – the one tool (or distribution channel) that is included in every single goal and at every step in the hierarchy of behavior is…..yes, you guessed it – your website & blog. Look for the yellow bubbles on the infographic.

Libby Hall in Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert Blog states it even better, with a real–life example:  “The blog on SunButter.com is our home base, where we’d ideally like to interact with all fans. Blog posts range from recipes, to guest posts from our favorite peanut allergy bloggers, to ideas for “royal snacks” for the royal wedding.”

For today’s marketers, the blog can be the central repository that allows them to capture content from a wide variety of sources and then repurpose it out into other communications.  Use web-to-post forms to collect stories from other web channels. Use email-to-post to forward emails to your blog. Transcribe your videos. Incent  employees to share their favorite ideas. So, you have to ask yourself – am I capturing all the great content that is already all around me? Then, how can I use blog content in other places? After all, it’s already written. It can be edited and reformatted. Push out to social networks. Develop ads. Use it as a base for your outbound email marketing. The possibilities are endless. Why create when you can repurpose?