MackCollier.com

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Two Things You Can Start Doing Today to Immediately Make Your Business Blog More Interesting

Let’s be honest, most of us do not get up every morning ready to read our favorite business blog. I have great sympathy for the writers and content managers who are tasked with creating content for their company’s blog. Drawing people to a business blog, and engaging them so they become regular readers is a very difficult task. Here’s two strategies I use to help clients create more interesting and engaging content for their blogs:

1 – Talk less about your company and more about what’s interesting to your customer. Remember that when you are building a readership for your blog, you are attempting to connect with people that have little or no awareness about who your company is or what it sells. So you have to find a way to interest these readers, and the way to do that is by talking about things that are interesting to them, then relate those things back to your company.

I love marketing. Let me rephrase that; I love GOOD marketing. Good marketing often goes unnoticed, and makes everything better, not worse. When I first started blogging in 2005, my goal was to make marketing interesting to people that didn’t understand marketing or care to read about marketing. I did that by attaching marketing to things that DID interest them. I talked about how music artists use marketing, or how sports teams use marketing. And as I did, I talked about how those same marketing lessons could apply to their businesses.

You should do the same thing with your company blog. Focus on your audience, the people you want to connect with and reach. Figure out what’s interesting to them, and how you can tie that to your company. Think about how what your company sells can impact the lives of your customers and make their lives more meaningful. Blog about that impact, because once they see the impact, they will become interested in your content and in learning more about how your company can help them achieve that impact.

2 – Tell stories. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to get the attention of your readers. There’s two main ways you can do this, by telling stories of your customers, or telling stories about your company. By telling stories about your customers, you make the content more relatable to your readers. It’s easiest to see the content from the customer’s point of view many times than it is the company’s point of view.

You can also tell stories about your company. This is a great way to tell the history of your company or to talk about the values that your company holds dear or the causes it supports. This is a great way to connect with your readers by letting them know you support causes and ideas that they hold dear, or by talking about your company’s history, and making the case that your company has a long and successful history.

Here’s a simple example of how a company can use storytelling to tell its history. A couple of years ago I talked about how Maersk, a global B2B shipping company, created an incredibly engaged community on Instagram and Facebook. Maersk’s social manager discovered that the company’s archivist had amassed a collection of roughly 30,000 images associated with the brand over the last century. The images were literally sitting in a cabinet collecting dust for the most part. No one had ever thought to use them, but the social manager decided to use them to tell the story of the Maersk brand and what it does. So the brand started sharing the images on social media. This helped educate others on what the company does (global shipping), but that it has been doing that for a long time! And all it took was using images that the company already had on hand, that it saw no real use for.

As luck would have it, just as I am writing this post this morning, ProBlogger left a great tweet with 14 types of stories you can tell:

 

So hopefully, that gives you plenty of ideas for how to make your business blog content more engaging and interesting. Keep in mind that building a readership for any blog is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency is the name of the game. I will have a blogging recap of what happened here in October on Monday, to give you an idea of how this blog is doing. Even with a much greater output of posts, it still takes a while to build a readership.

Hope that helps you!

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How to Structure a Welcome Pack For Brand Ambassadors

Recently, the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association launched its first Brand Ambassador Program. You can learn more about the program here. I gave AMLTA some feedback on the program at launch, and they sent me the Welcome Pack they are sending their Brand Ambassadors as they enter the program. I wanted to share the contents with you here as I know many of you are considering a brand ambassador program for your own company or organization and this can help you figure out what to include when you reach out to your own brand ambassadors.

AMLTA promotes the North Alabama area and its ambassadors are a new tool to help local and regional travelers and tourists learn more about what makes North Alabama such a wonderful place to visit. These ambassadors will be helping to tell North Alabama’s stories and to help put a spotlight on what makes the area so special and unique.

 

What is a Welcome Pack for Brand Ambassadors?

A welcome pack is given to brand ambassadors as they agree to enter your brand ambassador program. Typically, a welcome pack will include merchandise associated with your brand, and other items designed to communicate to the brand ambassadors that you appreciate their involvement. Additionally, a good welcome pack will include guidelines and advice for creating social media content that promotes the brand, as well items that can be given to customers such as swag or discount codes. A good welcome pack will make ambassadors feel appreciated, but also give them the tools they need to create content that better promotes your brand, as well as connect with potential customers.

With that definition in mind, let’s look at what Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association included in its Welcome Pack.

The Welcome Pack given to brand ambassadors includes:

  • Three t-shirts
  • One ball cap
  • North Alabama Activity Book
  • Spiral notebook and calendar
  • Flyer for connecting on social media
  • Spiral instruction book on how to use social media

Here’s the clothes included:

Welcome pack for AMLTA ambassadors

The three shirts and hat include the #VisitNorthAl hashtag as well as mentions the NorthAlabama.org website. This also gives the ambassadors clothing to wear when they are visiting sites and attractions around North Alabama. It’s worth remembering that with a program such as this, where a tourism association is using a brand ambassador program, the tourism association is attempting to get its member attractions and sites engaged in the program. By launching a brand ambassador program such as this, AMLTA is communicating to current and potential members in North Alabama that its ambassadors will help promote tourism in North Alabama. Sites and attractions around North Alabama will be able to more easily identify the program’s ambassadors, and see the value from their work. This will likely lead to members being proactive about working with the ambassadors directly to help coordinate trips and work with them on site. As the value of the program is more clearly communicated to members, those members will be more willing to participate and work with the brand ambassadors.

AMLTA also included a spiral Time to Get Social instruction book for its Brand Ambassadors. I just love this idea, as the book is designed to not only teach the ambassadors how to create content with social media, but to do so in a way that helps promote sites and attractions in North Alabama. The book gets into content creation, brand positioning and gives the ambassadors advice on how to best promote and showcase North Alabama via social media.

Social media guidelines for AMLTA ambassadors

If you’re launching a brand ambassador program, it’s vital that you give your ambassadors training and clear instruction on how to properly communicate with the people they will be interacting with every day. This instruction book on how to use social media is a fabulous example of a guidebook you could give your ambassadors to carry with them ‘in the field’.

 

When you are working with your brand ambassadors and giving them information and materials associated with the program, you want to focus on three areas:

  • Making sure the brand ambassadors are easily identified as such to other people
  • Making sure the brand ambassadors have the materials they need to promote your company or organization in a way that’s consistent with your program’s goals
  • Making sure the brand ambassadors have a way to refer other potential ambassadors to the program

When you create a Welcome Pack for your brand ambassadors, think about how you can create that pack with each of these areas in mind.  What would you give the ambassadors so they can easily be identified as such by others? What training or resources will you give them to better perform the tasks they are assigned? What tools will you give them to refer other potential ambassadors to the brand, or to spread the word about the program to others?

Hopefully this post gives you some ideas on how you could structure a Welcome Pack for your own brand ambassadors, especially in the tourism industry. To learn more about AMLTA’s brand ambassadors and program, click here.

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Case Study: National Geographic’s “Your Shot” Photography Community

One of the smart tactics many brands are leveraging is incorporating user-generated content into its social content streams. The idea is that you take content that your customers or fans are creating, and highlight it alongside your own. It gives the content creators a platform to get more exposure for their work, plus it helps the brand in getting more content. For example, Visit North Alabama is one of my favorite accounts to follow on Instagram. They often use pictures submitted by followers in their Instagram feed, such as this beauty:

National Geographic has taken this idea a step further with its Your Shot community. Your Shot invites photographers to submit their photos to ‘assignments’ that are posted on the site.  The assignments revolve around a particular theme, such as ‘Close Encounters’ or ‘Adventures in the City’. The submissions are reviewed by editors at National Geographic as well as the larger community on the site, and the best ones are selected to appear on the site.

When asking for customers/users/community members to submit content that you will use, there must be a clear benefit to the content creator in doing so. In this case, the benefit to National Geographic is obvious; They get a ton of gorgeous pictures submitted from talented photographers.

But what is the benefit to the photographers? Besides additional exposure for their work, these photographers also have a chance to have their work critiqued by National Geographic’s editors, as well as by the community at large:

This is invaluable advice from both the editors and the community at large. The community can comment on the work as well as select the elements of each shot that they appreciated. It can give the photographer detailed guidance on where his or her work is excelling as well as what they can improve on.

If you are going to test the user-generated content waters, make sure that the users you are appealing to have a clear incentive to share their content with you, and that there is a clear benefit to them from doing so. By agreeing to share their photos with National Geographic, the benefit these photographers get is clear, and who knows, a few spectacular shots might even land an aspiring photographer on National Geographic’s short list the next time they are hiring.

Remember, if you give your customers/users a clear benefit to share their content with you, they will be more likely to share content with you, and the content they do share will be of higher quality. The goal is to have a clear win-win for both you and your customers/users.