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Why You Need Email Marketing as an Effective Digital Channel

Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Image Credit: Talha Khalil/Pixabay

Many businesses don’t consider email as an effective marketing channel. Yet, it remains one of the most effective and cost-efficient methods for businesses to connect with their target audience, build brand loyalty, and drive conversion. If you Google for email marketing stats, you will see some supporting figures.

  • HubSpot says the Return-on-Investment (RoI) for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent.
  • MailChimp gives a break-down of different email marketing KPIs.
  • In its 2023 “B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends” report, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that nearly three out of four marketers it surveyed use email newsletters to distribute content.
  • Other stats from Oberlo shows:
    • 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (data from Emarsys, 2018).
    • Average email open rate is 20.81%, but with personalisation, the open rate increases by 50% (data from Yes Lifecycle Marketing, 2019).

Common Resistance Against Email Marketing

However, when it comes to email marketing, many small-to-medium-sized businesses don’t consider it as a channel worth pursuing. Some common resistance include:

  • It’s dead. B2B customers won’t read our email to make a decision.
  • We don’t have the budget for it.
  • It will end up in their spam folder. The rest will simply unsubscribe.
  • How do you measure success? Simply because someone is opening an email doesn’t mean they will read it.
  • We have run it before and didn’t have much traction.

Let’s talk about these points one by one.

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

Email marketing is very much alive. Take Netflix for example. How do they tell you what’s coming to your screen next Friday, or when the second season of your favourite crime drama will stream? They send you an email every week. How do you keep updated with your favourite industry, fashion, food, or travel topic? Chances are, you signed up for a few newsletters.

So, it really depends on what you want from your emails. Most companies will pay for a marketing campaign as long as it helps some kind of conversion. While email marketing can be used for direct conversion (think about the times you looked at an unbeatable bargain for a holiday, a dinner, or cruise, and clicked on the link), you also need to remember who you are sending the email to, and for what purpose. For B2B prospects or customers, chances are, your cold email won’t go very far. That’s what sales pitches are there for. On the other hand, if you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and want your subscribers to update to the latest software version because it offers some great new feature, there’s a higher probability of conversion.

Cost Can be Minimised

You can minimise email marketing costs in multiple ways, not least by integrating it with existing resources, collaterals, tools, and processes. Here are some examples:

  • The same graphics you are using for blog posts or printed collaterals can be reused for emails. The eBook or whitepaper you are promoting through a social media campaign can be the subject of the next email. Not all your email contacts may be following your company on social media. How do they know about the eBook if you don’t tell them?
  • You can create templated emails for different types of campaigns (for example, welcome emails, product or service update emails, special offer emails, outreach emails, or news update emails), and most of the content will be reusable, saving significant time.
  • Your CRM tool will most probably have an email automation facility. It will either be free or come with a relatively small price tag. It will be able to tap into your existing list of prospects, leads, and customers. Also, some of the well-known email automation tools come with a free plan for up to a certain number of emails per campaign. Unless you mind having a link back to their website from your emails (“Powered By” – in very small font), these can help you get started quickly.

You Can Spam-Proof Your Emails

The chances of your emails automatically ending up on your recipient’s spam folder depends on a few factors (this list isn’t exhaustive though):

  • The IP address or domain you are sending it from.
  • The subject line you are using.
  • The absence of an unsubscribe link.
  • The reputation of the links you are using in the email body.
  • The account you are using to send the email.

With careful planning, emails can be made not to end up in the user’s spam folder. This is one area many businesses don’t pay enough attention to. You can control some of these aspects using DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and the cybersecurity-related measure: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

Unsubscribe Is Not the End of It

Simply because someone has unsubscribed from your email list doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. An unusually high unsubscribe rate should ring alarm bells of course, but people who have opted in for emails do that for a reason. Most unsubscription will happen for a few reasons:

  • Your recipients don’t know you. They have not opted in for your emails, or they have never heard from you. This often happens when you purchase email lists from third-party providers.
  • You are targeting the wrong people for the wrong campaigns. Think about it. If your CRM is not updated, you may not know that the CxO of a client has changed jobs. They may have awarded you business when they were working for an IT company, but now they are the CxO of a weight-loss program. Chances are, your emails about the latest software offer won’t be relevant to their job.
  • Your emails are too pushy, too salesy, and lack any empathy for the recipient.

Whatever the reason, if someone unsubscribes from your list, it’s actually good, because it gives you an opportunity to look at your campaign more critically, and your email list is one step closer towards becoming more targeted.

Measuring Success Depends on Defining Success

Measuring success in email campaign depends on what you define as “success”. Your email marketing campaigns (or the very reason of using email as a digital channel) should have clear objectives. What is that objective? Is it informing prospects and clients of the upcoming webinar and getting them to sign up? Is it following up a lead after someone has downloaded an eBook? Is it a welcome pack with links to more resources?

Most people see email campaign success through the lens of technical measurements like open rates, bounce rates, or click through rates. These figures are necessary, but you also have to remember, those technical KPIs will change with the objectives you set.

For example, when you want to measure the conversion of a webinar sign-up email campaign, the click through rate (CTR) shows the overall effectiveness of your email in getting people to interact with it. To get more value from this KPI, you can create a custom link with parameters to the webinar lading page and include that link in your email. Once users click on that link and go to the landing page, analytics tools like Google Analytics can accurately show the unique traffic coming from the email source.

To dig deeper, you can get a report from your email automation tool about the contacts who clicked on the link. You can then compare that list with the actual sign-up attendees and see how many email recipients actually signed up for the webinar after clicking the link.

Now, consider another use case where you want to inform people of an upcoming policy change. You will probably want to track only one KPI, the open rate, to measure its effectiveness.

Why Email Campaigns Fail

As the saying goes, “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” Before writing off your past email marketing initiatives as ineffective, think about the reasons they may have failed. Ask yourself these questions:

  • How did you define success for the email campaign? Was your expectation realistic? How did you know the campaign was not successful?
  • Was the email list updated with the latest contact information?
  • Did you target the right audience for the right campaign? Did you segment the recipients?
  • Was your subject line poorly written, too pushy, salesy, or spammy?
  • Was there a lack of personalisation in your email subject, salutation, or email body?
  • Was your email designed poorly? Was it too cluttered with too much information?
  • Did it have a single and clear call to action (CTA)?
  • Did it open in browser correctly? Was it mobile-friendly?
  • Were you sending too many emails too frequently?
  • Were all the links in the email working properly?
  • Did you include unsubscribe links? Did you add other necessary links like your privacy policy or social media channels?
  • Did you use automation to ensure emails were sent on time, at the right time or season?
  • Did you try a variation of your email campaigns with A/B testing?

Chances are, when you consider these questions, you will find one or more reasons why your campaigns might have failed (or still failing). Once you address those issues, results should improve, often dramatically.

Final Words

Hopefully, this post has given you some food for thought about email marketing. So how do you get started, or bring your existing campaigns to frutition? To manage successful email marketing campaigns, the first thing businesses should do is create need is a strategy. In the next part of this article series, we will talk about questions you should consider when building that strategy.

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How to Write Great Case Studies for Successful B2B Marketing

Writing great case studies for effective B2B marketing needs careful planning
Image Credit: Scott Graham/Unsplash

Case studies are a great way to showcase your brand’s authority to the rest of the world. Simply put, a case study shows how your product or service has been crucial in solving a B2B client’s real-world problem in the most effective manner. This is persuasive advertisement because it comes with the power of storytelling. Everyone loves to hear a great story, and you are doing exactly that. Companies often name case studies like “Customer Stories” or “Customer Success Stories”.

Why Should You Create Case Studies?

Case studies are meant to build .your brand’s credibility by highlighting your expertise or offering in a particular area. Its goal is to grow confidence in the minds of prospects who might be looking for a solution to a similar or even the same problem. In that sense, case studies can make great content for the consideration phase of inbound marketing. In fact, according to a 2020 State of Marketing Trend Report from HubSpot, 13% of marketers consider case studies as one of the primary components of their content strategy.

How Do Case Studies Look Like?

Typically, case studies are freely available from a company’s website under the “Resources” section. However, in some rare cases, a business may decide to share gated case studies with its existing customers only.

Some businesses may have many case studies on their website. Canva is one example. Others may not have any or only a few. Depending on how much potential your story has for conversion, you can highlight it on the home page or a landing page.

Some case studies can be downloaded like an eBook in PDF format, while others are available as web copies. This case study from well-known data management software company Talend is a dowloadable PDF file that shows stories of seven of their customers, written in a concise form. The same company took a unique approach by incorporating video in this featured customer story.

What Should Case Studies Contain?

The way you want to present your case studies will depend on what type of information you want to convey to prospects. We will talk about case study structures shortly, but effective case studies are backed by data. Such data can be supplied by the customer, collected by you, or even be available in the public domain. You can present the data using charts, graphs, numbers, infographics, bulleted lists, or screenshots. For example, if your marketing agency specializes in SEO service, your case study can include screenshots of your client’s website traffic behavior from Google Analytics—before and after your changes. But here’s what you need to remember: the information you include must be verifiable, proven, and collected from a respectable authority. This case study from the [M]System Agency is an excellent example of using data in your stories.

There’s no hard limit to the length of a case study. However, since these are targeted at decision-makers, overly long content can easily distract readers or cause them to abandon reading before reaching call-to-action (CTA). We recommend keeping case study lengths between 1,000 to 1,200 words.

What Should You Consider Before Writing Case Studies?

The number of case studies you should publish, or the type of content you should include in those will depend on a number of factors. For example:

  • Who’s your target audience, and what information could they seek in a case study? Will they want to see your product or service’s performance in the market? Will they want to see why other companies are choosing your product or service?

    It could be difficult to know, but this is where your sales team can help because they will have some insight into customer inquiries. If you have no such information, write your case studies for the buyer personas you created for your ideal customer profile.
  • Do you want to highlight one product or service or more in your case studies?
  • How well do you know your customers, and how well do they know you? Do you have a business relationship close enough that even your customer will highlight the story on their social media channel or various events?
  • How willing are your customers to share their stories with you for publishing? Some clients may have regulatory requirements which prohibit vendors from disclosing any information.
  • Was your story with the customer already published or talked about elsewhere? Do you want to highlight it as a star use case?
  • Did your product or service play the most pivotal role in solving the customer’s problem, or was it a small part of the solution?
  • Was it a once-off solution from your product or service line, or the product/service was used by multiple customers in different situations? A flagship product or service is always a good candidate for case studies.

Ideally, you would want to hight the best of your customer stories where the solution played a huge role. Many companies highlight case studies of their well-known and often famous customers.

As you can see, planning for case studies can take some time, but once you have set some basic reference rules, you can start creating case stduy templates and workflows your content creators can use. If you want to get started quickly, you can try out HubSpot’s case study templates.

How Do You Gather All the Information for Case Studies?

The central part of any case study should be the customer you helped. That’s why you first need to discuss with your client if they are happy for you to highlight their story on your website. Nobody likes negative coverage, so you must assure your clients—and ensure—the case study you want to write does not show them in any way that hurts their reputation.

Once you have the go-ahead, you need to set up times with their key stakeholders for interviews. You should interview those who were directly involved during the project and those who can talk about the impact your solution has made on the company. People consider their time valuable, and you will probably get only one appointment with your subject, so make sure you are asking the right questions.

For the interviews, start by asking questions your subjects are most familiar with, and then build upon the answers. Ensure all the questions are open-ended. Also, make sure you are recording the interviews with their consent.

Here’s a sample list of questions you may want to ask.

The Business
  • Tell me about your company—what industry are you in, and what does your business do?
  • Can you please provide figures about your organization, like turnover, number of staff, office locations, type of clients you have, or similar?
The problem
  • What was the business problem you were trying to solve?
  • Was there a particular trigger that made you decide it was time to act?
  • What were the key challenges you needed to address?
  • How was the problem affecting your business? Can you give some quantitative figures?
The solution
  • What were your project objectives?
  • When did the project begin and end?
  • Why did you choose our company?
  • What technologies, processes, and workflows were used?
  • What was the process for developing the solution? (If you’re an IT company, provide the technical details of the solution yourself.  Don’t rely on your client to provide this information, as they may not be aware of the depth/breadth of your work).
  • Were there any extra challenges during the project that our company helped you solve?
Results
  • How is the solution now being used?
  • Has it achieved the project objectives?
  • What quantifiable benefits can you attribute to the solution (e.g., return on investment, dollars or time saved, dollars earned, customer happiness index, number of enrolments, etc.)?
  • What other business benefits have you experienced as a result of this solution?
  • How does this compare to how you were doing things previously?
  • Who are the main users, and what changes has it made to their roles?
  • How have the users reacted? 
Future plans
  • Do you have plans for future development on this solution?
  • Off the back of this project, are there any other projects either underway or in the pipeline?
  • Will you be considering our company for future projects? If so, why?
Testimonial
  • If you were to recommend our company, what would you say?
  • How would you describe your relationship with our company?

This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. The basic rules of interviews apply here: you need to be on top of your questions to get all the answers within the allocated time, but you also don’t interrupt people when they are talking about the project passionately.

Depending on how in-depth you want to go with your case study, you may need to interview stakeholders from your company too. They can be salespeople who closed the deal, presales engineers (if you are a technology company), support staff, or project managers.

How Should You Structure Your Case Studies?

Once you have gathered all the information and data for your case study, it’s time to write it is in a structured manner. A case study structure should include the following:

The Problem

This is where you describe what challenges your customer faced and how those impacted their businesses. Relevant figures and insights can be a powerful driver here. For example, the problem can highlight the money the company was losing daily, the time it took to complete a business process, or the number of opportunities the business was losing.

You, the Solution Provider

This is where you describe how your business was involved and why. Did the client approach you? Did you apply through a bidding process and win the work? Why did the client decide to hire you? More importantly, why did you feel confident you could help the business?

Your Magic Formula

This is the crux of the content. This is where you describe how you approached and solved the problem. Describe in detail:

  • What products and services you used for the solution?
  • Why you chose that path as the best possible solution?
  • What problems did you and the client face when adopting this solution, and how you overcame those hurdles?
  • How long did it take?

Once again, you can use figures and insights to back your points. For example, the client was using an older class of machine that could churn out only X widgets per hour. Knowing the customer’s industry well, your company recommended the newer generation Y machines, which could be easily calibrated to produce more or less than X widgets per hour, giving the customer the benefit of scalability. In doing so, you found many existing pipelines integrated with the older machines could not interoperate with the Generation Y version, so you created a custom integrator in record time.

Points like these not only prove your brand’s expertise but also shows that you care for your clients and are prepared to go the extra mile.

The Happy Customer

In this part, you describe what the client got in the end and how it affected their businesses. As with other parts of the story, figures and charts are a great means of communicating your findings. Side-by-side comparisons of before and after states are a powerful way to show prospective buyers that they, too, can get such benefits by hiring you. As an extra bonus, you can add client testimonials here. Nothing assures prospective buyers more than great testimonials from buyers who have done business with you.

Call to Action (CTA)

This is the last part of the case study, where you ask prospects to contact you if interested. This section should be fairly small and not look like you are making a sales pitch. The CTA should briefly introduce your company and what it offers and include a link to an online contact form or provide other details like an email address or phone number.

Letting the World Know

To ensure your case study is discoverable by organic traffic, it should follow all the basic rules of SEO. These include things like title length, meta descriptions, keywords, headings, and so on.

But you also want to tell the rest of the world about it. As we mentioned before, sometimes a case study can be so important your marketing department may want to highlight it on the home page or a landing page of the website.

You should also run a social media campaign once the piece is published. Another great way to promote is to run an email campaign to let your leads and clients know. If available as a web copy, the case study page should also include social share links.

Final Words

So there you have it: our tips for creating great case studies for effective and successful B2B marketing. Although it may seem complex, writing effective case studies mainly depends on getting the right information from the right people and presenting them in a compelling way.

Here at Professional Data Skills, we are really passionate about telling great stories about our customers, and we would love to create great case studies for you. If you want to know how we can tell your story, why not drop us a line?

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Beyond Blogs: 6 Types of Content B2B Marketers Should Create

Image Courtesy: Arisa Chattasa/Unsplash

There’s a lot more to content marketing than just posting regular blogs to your website.

The industry knowledge your business possesses and the client experience it has gained over time are potent sources of information for creating a range of digital assets. With the right content strategy, you can tap into this knowledge to produce content that:

  • Showcases your business’ expertise and experience
  • Positions your company as an industry leader
  • Educates your audience and help them along the sales funnel.

Producing content other than blog posts can initially seem daunting. Why do you need to write a whitepaper? What’s the point of creating an eBook, and when is a video more appropriate for capturing leads? 

To answer these questions, consider the big consulting or market research companies. These companies produce in-depth trend reports and content on specific topics and industries every year. Such content is usually gated and targeted toward decision-makers. Where do these firms get their information to produce such reports? You guessed it right—they tap into their organizational knowledge. Not only that, they repurpose the content over time.

You may not be running a global multi-billion dollar company, but you too can produce valuable content for your clients and prospects and use those as powerful lead magnets.

Here are six types of content we recommend every B2B company should produce. You should also recommend these to your clients if you are a digital marketing agency.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers may have a reputation for being bland and dense, but well-written whitepapers can truly differentiate your business from your competitors. As we mentioned in another blog post, people read them because they have to, not because they want to.  This is because whitepapers usually have a formal tone, are written for specific audience types, and focus on a single topic from a high level. The audience is usually well-versed on the topic but needs guidance to solve a problem or make a critical decision. When you give readers such information at their fingertips, a well-written whitepaper becomes a well-received resource that establishes your company’s authority. It becomes an essential resource for gaining trust.

Your whitepaper should explain a single problem and offer a solution without being too hands-on or coming across as overly promotional. It’s a high-quality report that persuades your audience with evidence rather than hype. You are educating your readers, not selling them anything.

eBooks

The cool and casual sibling of the whitepaper is the eBook. Presented in a less-formal style, they can be a how-to guide, highlight company research findings, or explain a new service. Typically, eBooks are not as specific as whitepapers when it comes to topics. Oftentimes eBooks cover a broader topic with the content broken up into chapters covering various subtopics. Thus, the content flows less cohesively than in a whitepaper because whitepapers have sections instead of chapters, but the eBook is designed for the reader to skim through.

Also, just like printed books, eBooks often have tables of contents. They also make heavy use of diagrams, imagery, or infographics. Another feature of eBooks is that critical points are often highlighted for the busy reader. 

Like whitepapers, eBooks are high-value resources that can improve your lead nurturing processes.

Case Studies

Case studies are a written portfolio of your company’s work. Unlike eBooks or whitepapers, case studies are usually not gated. They are primarily available as web copies instead of downloadable documents, although exceptions exist.

Like eBooks and whitepapers, case studies show your business’ expertise and commitment to solving customer problems. A case study structure is divided into distinct parts:

  • The client problem: what challenges was the customer facing?
  • The effect of the problem: how was it affecting your customer’s business? For example, losing revenue, lower customer satisfaction, and complex processes taking too much time.
  • When and how was your business involved: how did the client find you? Why did they hire your business?
  • What did your business do to solve the customer’s problem: this is usually a detailed description of which products or services you recommended and how those were pivotal in solving the problem.
  • What else did the customer get: other tangible and intangible benefits besides the immediate solution?
  • Testimonial: did the customer leave any feedback?

As you can see, properly-written case studies can become persuasive social proof. In some cases, long-form case studies can be written as eBooks, or multiple case studies can be bundled into a downloadable resource.

Videos

When it comes to video marketing, everybody seems to know its importance, yet nobody seems to do it enough. The thought process behind this is that videos are too time, resource, and cost-consuming to produce, and there is not enough ROI. Yet, videos are a compelling means to convey your message. And they don’t always have to be created with professional actors, lighting, and studio setups.

Your video library can reside in a few places. For example, an introductory video from the CEO can be featured on the main page or landing pages. How-tos, onboarding, and explainer doodle videos can be featured on public or private documentation sites. These can also be on your YouTube channel. People subscribe to such channels when you convey enough helpful information. Think about Google or HubSpot video series as an example.

The types of videos you post can be as varied. Many companies post their webinars online. Similarly, you can post client interviews, new product launches, or award ceremonies, to name a few.

Sites like YouTube allow you to add closed caption subtitles to videos. The text is fully crawlable by search engines and, if SEO-optimized, may often feature on the first page of search results.

Another place to post videos is your social media channels. Social media videos can have a broader impact depending on your type of business. Think of TikTok as an example. Many people think of it as too consumer-oriented, yet brands are slowly but surely using it for awareness and conversion.

The key to video success lies in the content’s quality. When presented succinctly, valuable information can leave a long-lasting effect on the viewer, priming them to return for more.

Infographics

If pictures are a thousand words, infographics are worth the adage (beside videos). These are short forms of content, usually freely downloadable and not gated. Infographics are often part of eBooks as well.

As the name suggests, Infographics show information in a graphical manner. The information is typically statistical in nature. They can show current status, predictions, comparisons, or even how-tos. For example, if you are a luxury car wholesaler, you may want to add an infographic on your website showing the top ten cars based on their market shares, user satisfaction level, and features. By showing such statistical figures through images, you are advising your B2B customers (retail car dealers) on which cars they should buy from you and stock up on. If you are a Fintech company, you may want to advise your website visitors about the top 5 sources of cloud waste.

Outreach Content

The final item on our list is what we call outreach content. We named it so because although such content can be used for inbound marketing, you are not hosting it on your website—you are reaching out on the Internet for potential leads.

The first type of outreach content is your guest blogs (yes, we know, we said this article is not about blogs). You write these blogs on reputable third-party sites where many of your target audience may congregate. For example, if you are a digital marketing firm, you may want to start a publication on Medium or create irregular LinkedIn articles. If you are a tech start-up, you may want to publish on sites like InfoQ, Dev.to, or Hackernoon. Writing in industry-famous publications and linking to your site can help build brand awareness and develop quality leads.

You can create the next type of outreach content on Q & A sites. Your B2B content marketing strategy can target sites like Quora and Stack Overflow and answer questions from possible leads. Again, such content establishes your brand authority. However, such sites usually have algorithmic rules to deter brand promotions. For example, your answer in Quora will not be directly visible if it contains links to your products or services. But the best thing about such content is that it can be featured on Google Answer Box for some queries.

Finally, we have social media posts and email newsletters as outreach content. You may not be creating something new here but using these channels to promote existing content. Writing email copy or social media posts requires careful planning and targeting specific customer segments (email) or hashtags (social media). And unlike blogs, whitepapers, infographics, or videos, social posts or email campaigns happen on a recurring schedule.

Besides promotion, emails are often used to announce new products or service offerings, explain a business decision to customers or suppliers, or even acknowledge and correct previous mistakes. Social media is a powerful tool for answering customer queries and highlighting user-generated content.

Final Words

So there you have it—our list of six types of content you should consider for your B2B business. It may not be possible (or even relevant) to tap on all six, but that’s where you can talk to an agency like ours. We are always keen to hear about your content needs and help you create both content strategies and content.

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6 Ways to Get Your Blog Posts to Reach a Wider Audience

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So you have published your latest and greatest blog post.

You have worked hard writing it, ensured you have primed it with carefully-researched keywords, and followed all the golden rules of SEO. Catchy titles, meta descriptions, H2 headings, and perfect header images are all there. In fact, the blog might have been written by the talented folks of ProDataSkills. Google Analytics is showing traffic hitting your page.

But not at the rate you would have loved. 

It’s been a week, and the schedule for your next post is in about another week. Why isn’t traffic spiking? You know you did everything you could have done to attract more traffic.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore. As much as we’d like our blogs to go viral on their own merits, it doesn’t work in a crowded world wide web. You need to tell people about it. Don’t depend on just Google.

So how do you reach a wider audience smartly and effectively? Here are six techniques you can follow.

Technique #1: Make it Shareable

The first step to getting more traffic to your blog post is to make it shareable. Even if your blog post attracts healthy traffic, you want to build on that success and keep the cycle going. What better way to do it than to get the people who read it to share it too? That’s why your blog site should have sharing option. Many sites allow their blogs to be shared on social media, email, or even instant messaging apps. This helps people to share your article without manually copy-pasting the URL.

Technique #2: Share on Social Media

This is the most straightforward strategy but one that’s often missed. You must inform your followers about your blog post on every social media channel your company has a profile on. LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta company page—you name it.

You can use a free tool like Canva to create a simple graphic with an intriguing excerpt from your blog and post it on social media. And don’t worry—it’s totally fine to post the same graphic on multiple platforms. If you aren’t using graphics, you can use the same or different text-based messages in all the channels. There’s a high probability your audience is different on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram. So copy/paste and post away.

What’s also essential is using relevant hashtags in your social media posts. These will show your post in the timeline of whoever subscribes to those hashtags. This will help those people find your blog.

And don’t think you can’t post the same message about your blog multiple times on the same channel. The Internet (and social media in particular) is a superfast freeway. People won’t remember what they saw three weeks ago. Even if they do remember your post about the blog, at worst, they won’t click on it, and if it resonates with them, they will repost or share it. We recommend you follow this strategy for blog posts with strong potential to increase your viewership, followership, or sales.

So, how often should you post about the same blog? It depends on your number of followers, how often you post, and the channels you are posting to. As a rule of thumb, wait at least two weeks before posting about the same blog.

Finally, if you have the budget, consider purchasing social media ads to boost your post. Although doing it for every post isn’t practical, it certainly helps to spread the word about blogs you want most people to see. 

Here at Professional Data Skills, we promote our blog posts through social media. We also ensure any articles we have written for our clients are promoted on social media channels.

Technique #3: Send an Email Newsletter

Think nobody reads your email newsletters? Well, you might be surprised to see some stats from this HubSpot blog. The average email open rate across all industries sits between 20% to 30%, and the clickthrough rate is between 1.2% to 3% (see Mailchimp and Smart Insights). 

However, think about the 1.5% of your database who open the email and click on your blog’s link. If you have 5,000 email addresses in your database, that’s still 50 people who are getting interested. Many of them might share it on their own social media channels.

Technique #4: Use Backlinks

If your blog post is part of a topic cluster, adding links from the pillar page and the other posts to your blog (and vice versa) makes sense. It doesn’t have to be only for topic clusters—as long as your article can be referenced from another blog, put a link pointing back to it. That way, traffic hitting your newer blog posts can also be aware of the original article.

Technique #5: Post on Multiple Platforms

Most publishing platforms will have strict rules about publishing duplicate content. But some may have more lenient policies. You could post your blog on those platforms (e.g., Medium) and add a disclaimer like “this article was first published on…”. Like topic clusters and backlinks, you can reference your original blog from articles you publish on different platforms. By submitting your blog to an external publication, you are spreading your knowledge to an already established network that could be far larger than your existing following. 

Rule #6: Use Q&A Sites

This goes back to our social media promotion technique. People look for answers on sites like Quora, Reddit, or Stack Exchange. Regularly answering industry-related questions on these sites establishes your brand as a thought leader and allows you to promote your blogs.

Let’s say your company offers a SaaS solution for workspace health and safety management. One of your blog posts is about the top 10 similar platforms. When you answer questions related to such topics (e.g., “what are some well-known workplace incident management tools?”), you could answer the question and provide a link to your blog.

Final Words

So now you have seen a few techniques to present your blogs to a broader audience. As you can see, apart from running ads, all these methods are free. All that’s needed is a little time and effort.

If you want to create thought-leadership or deep-dive, hands-on blogs for your technology company, our expert content creators will be more than happy to help. We can create well-researched content related to your products and services, promote them through social media and email campaigns, and report on subsequent engagement rates. To know more, contact us today.

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8 Best Practice Tips for Copyediting Your Own Writing

Image Courtesy: Daniel Thomas/Unsplash

In a perfect world, we would all have a professional editor always available to ensure our written work was top-notch. We would write the article, not care about grammar, spelling, or punctuation and expect our authors are smart enough to understand the thought process that went into creating the great piece of work. If it weren’t good enough, the editor would handle the rest.

And why not? With clients, publications, and agencies increasingly becoming tough on quality, it’s hard to submit an article, eBook, or whitepaper without some sort of editing going into it. But tighter budgets and punishing deadlines also mean that in most cases, there will be no one available to edit your work to make it look good. In fact, you are expected to edit your work before you submit the first draft.

And you better get used to this. There’s nothing worse than the gut-sinking feeling of spotting an error in something you’ve written just after you’ve hit the publish button or have emailed a document to an entire mailing list. 

Check out our simple tips to ensure your writing is polished, professional, and fit for purpose.

Copyediting and Proofreading: What’s the Difference?

You’ve probably heard the terms copyediting and proofreading used interchangeably. In a nutshell, there are two distinct levels of revising written work. Copyediting looks at the big picture, while proofreading takes care of cosmetic edits. Both are essential parts of the revision process.

Proofreading should be the final phase of editing before you hit “submit”. It’s where you tidy up spelling, grammar, punctuation, inconsistent capitalization, and style-related errors. Think of it as the final polish.

But before proofreading, you need to do a thorough copyedit. This is a substantial review of your text and is best undertaken once the draft is complete. It’s where you revise your work to make it better, crafting it into something that shines.

Why? Because what you think you’ve written and what was actually written can be very different. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes, you will often cringe at the quality of your work. That’s why copyediting often results in rewriting entire paragraphs of texts to improve overall consistency, structure, storytelling style, and flow of information. It also often means rearranging or shortening sentences, reorganizing sections, or elaborating on something you only touched upon. In short, copyediting can see you make significant structural changes to your written work.

The Value of Editing Your Work

Once you’ve put all your thoughts into a written form, sticking to a few simple copyediting rules can make a world of difference.

Copyediting ensures your next email, website copy, blog post, or whitepaper reads like the work of a professional. The aim is to produce a structurally sound document that flows well, avoids ambiguity, and includes all the information the reader needs. If your written work is ambiguous, untidy, or unclear, your readers will treat it accordingly. And worse still, your readers won’t probably read your next piece, and your editors or clients won’t give you further work either.

Importantly, copyediting gives you the best chance of ensuring your document doesn’t contain embarrassing mistakes. A thorough copyedit can catch the flaws in your writing before they’re shared with a wider readership. Sometimes editors and publishers will do final proofreading before publishing, but they may expect you to do the copyediting yourself. It’s not the proofreader’s task to tell you that you repeated the same concept twice within the article or that the conclusion to your story was abrupt.

Also, when you edit your writing, you will learn new things. A classic example is when you must keep your piece within a specific word count. Forced to comply with such restrictions, you will learn how to present your ideas succinctly.

Our Best Practice Tips for Copyediting

Now that you know what copyediting is and why you need to do it, here are some best practice tips.

Tip 1: Take a Break

You may have spent weeks writing your e-Book or several days composing an email newsletter. You have thoroughly researched your topic, repeatedly referenced your notes, made sure you have addressed all the submission requirements and even asked friends or family members to read your work. Everyone agrees it’s a great job. Now you have to do the editing.

Our advice? Take a break. Even when you are under a tight schedule, give it at least a good night’s sleep time and come back fresh.

Why? Because when you have spent a long time writing, you will be highly familiar with your work and be less likely to spot omissions, errors, or repetition.

Tip 2: Keep the Outline Handy

You should start copyediting your written work by checking if it covers everything it’s supposed to cover. One of the ways to check that is by comparing the written piece with the outline.

An outline is a bullet point list of what your written work should cover and how it should cover it. It gives an overview of the sections, subsections, and the depth they should go into. If you are not in the habit of creating an outline before you start writing, we highly recommend you do so from now on. Not only does it help you write the actual piece quickly, but the comparison also helps ensure you haven’t left any vital piece of information.

Tip 3: State your Goal Explicitly

It’s easy to assume that once your audience starts reading, they will automatically identify its aim and what you are trying to say. This is seldom the case. Your article’s introduction should clearly state the problem, why the reader should read on to find the answer, and what you will cover to give them the answer. Unless you’ve clearly stated these points upfront, it’s unlikely your readers will be motivated to read on. This is where your subject line, title, and opening paragraph can make a huge impact. You can use catchy or engaging wording to engage your readers early. If you are writing a multi-part series, briefly mention what the reader learned in the last installment and what they will learn today.  

Tip 4: Check the Document Structure

You should map a clear path for your “story” and ensure you adhere to it. Each piece of writing should have a clear structure with a beginning (introduction), a middle (the body), and an end (conclusion).

We talked about the introduction briefly. The document’s body should present the story’s central theme in a logical, easy-to-follow path. In other words, there should not be any abrupt jumps from one concept or event to the next. If you expect the reader to be familiar with something, don’t just assume it. State such assumptions where necessary. If you are writing an essay or a blog and you don’t want to want extraneous information, make a reference to an external link. Your readers will appreciate this.

Finally, the conclusion should be where your readers will make their own decision. You can state what the reader has learned or what the story has covered and give direction for where to go. It could be a simple call to action for signing up for the newsletter, an invitation to an event, or a prompt to check out other written works from you. It could even be a simple message for the reader to contemplate on.

Tip 5: Remember Your Audience

Even though you have put your heart and soul into your writing, remember that you are writing for your readers. Keep your audience’s level of understanding and time in mind. If your writing is for new mums about their newborns, you will want to use a compassionate voice and keep your message clear and short. Why? Because typically, they will have a short time available for reading and will be looking for relevant information only. Being overly patronizing or using medical jargon (unless you explain) won’t help here. If you are writing about the latest multi-player games, you must remember that your readers are tech-savvy and want to learn something new. Using a sales pitch won’t resonate with them. As you read through your work, ask yourself how each piece of information you provide will benefit your readers and if it should be there.

Tip 6: Don’t Repeat Yourself

When passionate about a topic, we often stress the same point more than once. However, your readers will appreciate brevity and clarity. If you have stated an opinion or fact once, leave it there: no reason to state it differently or say, “as we have said before”. If your text contains waffle words that don’t serve a purpose or make a point, take them out. Getting rid of repetition saves valuable time for the readers and allows you to add more relevant information.

Tip 7: Use Simple Sentences

In the same way that we find it easy to switch off when people talk in a monotone, readers will also quickly move away when they are not engaged. Try varying the length of your sentences. You may need to combine some sentences or shorten others. Similarly, don’t use convoluted sentences that go nowhere. As we showed in another blog post, writing in plain language makes reading much easier. This means you will have to break down complex sentences, use less jargon, and be concise. Similarly, paragraphs can be reordered to flow more smoothly, and text can be shuffled around. Use tools like Grammarly or Hemmingway, and look up synonyms where necessary.

Tip 8: Don’t Cram Everything in One Place

Some subjects can be quite lengthy to explain. Don’t try to tell the story in one piece if there’s too much information to fit in. For example, anything above 1500 words for blog posts will usually see readers losing interest or moving away. Break down your story into a multi-part series and create logical links between them so readers can follow through. What you leave out can be as important as what you leave in.

Final Words

Copyediting is the first line of defense against mediocre writing. It’s worth investing your time and effort – you’ll be rewarded with clear, concise, and compelling words that people want to read, and your readers will thank you for that.

If you liked this article, you can contact us for your corporate content marketing needs.

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