How a Content and Digital Marketing Guy Can Change the Game?

Most of the small to mid-size companies are competing in the common technologies space such as Java/JEE, .NET and open source technology stack wherein they do not have much unique to offer. And, this creates tremendous pressure on the sales team to perform and sign on new customers in order to remain sustainable and profitable. And, the common techniques used by sales team to reach out to customer includes emails and cold calls. This methodology, however, does not prove that effective given every companies’ sales team adopt same set of techniques. This puts pressure on sales team as well as senior management teams to find out USPs that they have to offer.

In my experience, I have found that most of them miss the most important USP that they have is their strong technology team. But, how could they make difference with strong technology team in a measurable manner even if some of them believe on this and speak the same to all the prospects during initial sales pitch that they make. They could make great difference by having their strong technology team expertise and experience reach out to prospect based on pull-based marketing.

Take a look at the diagram below representing the sustainable reach of internal teams to outside world by making use of one content-writer and a digital marketing guy:

In above diagram, following can be noted:

• Blogging
  • Various different technical teams working on different projects including different technologies come across new set of problems on day-to-day basis. These problems are related with business as well as technologies. The member of these technical teams, however, may not be able to express their learnings in organized and detailed manner.
  • There is maintained a backlogs of articles/blogs on internal WIKI which is accessible to all of the technical teams, content writer and digital marketing guy.
  • Based on their learning, members of various technical teams register their interest to get one or more topics published as blog on their corporate blog website.
  • Content writer, having access to backlogs of blog topics on internal WIKI contacts the topic owner to discuss and know more about their topics. Based upon the discussion, the content writer goes ahead and create a write-up on behalf of the topic owner. In case, the topic owner already has something in the written form, the content writer based upon the discussion goes ahead and rehash the write-up.
  • Once, the topic owner (technical team members) and the content writer agrees on the write-up, the blog gets published on the corporate blog website.
• Digital Marketing
  • Once the blog is published on the corporate blog website, the digital marketing guy goes ahead and plan to publish the links to the blogs on various different technology links website such as dzone.com, stumbleupon.com, digg.com etc.
  • The links to these blogs are also published to the corporate social media webpages such as facebook.com, twitter.com, LinkedIn.com etc.
  • The digital marketing and content writer works together to create slides and documents out of the blog and the documents get published on document websites such as slideshare.net, docstoc.com etc.
  • Digital marketing guy and content writer could work together to shot video based on the blog by interviewing the technical team members, and post these videos on websites such as youtube.com, vimeo.com etc.
• Newsletters
  • Based on the collection of blogs in a month or a quarter, content writer and digital marketing guys could work together to identify the top blogs based on the visitors from different media channels and shares/likes count that these blogs achieved. The information on the visitors could be obtained from tools such as google analytics. These top blogs could then be published as a newsletter to internal employees and external customers.

The above would help the company achieve some of the following objectives and make a difference in the crowded space:

1. Have their prospects get to know about their technology expertise and experience by reading their blogs.
2. Have their existing customers know about their ongoing technology expertise by reading newsletters.
3. Have the new prospects gaze the companies’ technology expertise by reading blogs, watching videos on social media websites.