Hello SME friends,

Our company, Cambridge Technology Enterprises, http://www.ctepl.com/ is venturing into the blogging world. We have a blog which is inactive right now. We want to rejuvenate it.

Our challenge is the content. Since we are a high-tech B2B company, most of what we do is highly technical but many of the people who make the decision of buying our products are not engineers. How do we come up with the content that appeals to both the groups?

We need the right balance so that the content is still interesting enough to generate reactions, but specific enough to the technology to be informative.

Any thoughts on how we can achieve this? If you are from the IT industry, which blogs would you say do a good job at keeping you hooked? I appreciate any feedback you share.

@kristi-hines

Hi Kristi,

“Step-by-step” is a great suggestion. I also like SME’s blog posts with numbers. If an idea sounds like the one that I already know, I just skip to the next one. “Steps” make that easy.

What about the topics though? I guess we can vary the technical complexity of those and repeat the nature of posts after certain interval. e.g. engineering kind of posts once per month, then industry issues once per month etc. What do you think?

By the way, loved your latest blog post. The post is bookmarked as the compilation of blogging resources.

@doolin Definitely a good thing!

We do ask our engineers to contribute. Many of them do not like that extra work though. But that’s another issue, for a later discussion.

What do you mean by “Credibility” – Knowing that the post is coming from an engineer will hold more value than if a marketer writes it?

Thanks, Dave!

@doolinI

Dave, I agree with you on the credibility part. I feel the same. We should consider making our engineers regular contributors to the blog.

Seems like the writing task feels to be “extra work” for our engineers since they do not feel that writing is their strength. They already have tons of stuff they can talk about and would like to. If I can convince them the value in writing, management isn’t a problem. They are already convinced of that; Fortunately!

Why do you say it is not the “extra work”? I feel it is, but it is worth it.

Thanks for all your input.

@manasikakade You could try varying technical posts, strategy posts, and posts on industry related topics/news that both the decision makers & engineers would be interested in.

Hi @manasikakade For topics, start by looking at the top content on your website then doing some keyword research around those terms. Use webmaster tools and analytics to start, then look for related or similar terms using the Google Keyword Tool, or even human brainstorming.

For example, I see you have interesting cross-over content under Innovation > Cambridge Executive Workshops. I’m sure there are a ton of great topics that you could write about based on these workshops.

I’d also think about your sales cycle and what common questions or road blocks a customer can encounter, then I’d figure out how to write posts on those repeat touchpoints where a marketer or executive is trying to build a case for an engineer, and then the engineer questions that are posed. 

News, events, whitepapers. A lot of your existing content can be promoted through the blog. I like the suggestion from @phil-mershon on doing quick interviews or video blogs. Things like the “Whiteboard Fridays” from SEOMOZ would be an example that could work for you. 

My best advice is to step back for a moment. If you can’t think of 12 topics off the top of your head to blog about, then maybe you shouldn’t blog. Maybe twitter or G+ or even tumblr would be better. Blogging is a lot of work, if you’re having trouble with the topics and you haven’t started yet, that’s not a good sign.

All the best,Monique

Wow! So many great ideas. I love this forum already!

@phil-mershon Phil, I LOVE the idea of interviews. That will be indeed easy for the engineers and me. We may also be able to use the same blog videos on our YouTube channel. Thank you so much!

@howwhowhen I should take a look at the book. This is the first time I heard about it. Thanks!

@kristi-hines Would you please elaborate on the “strategy posts”? I don’t understand what that means. Thank you!

@boxcarmarketing Thanks a bunch for the detailed insights! Fortunately, we have a good problem to have – a lot of content that we can and want to share. We just need to figure out a systematic way to channel it. Including the sales cycle FAQs as blog posts is a good idea – especially given the complexity of our products + services. We need to build up on it.

@Abigail I totally hear ya! I am an engineer myself and have been through the same situation. Which is why I want to make this process as easy for our engineers as I can. But I also know that no one understands the product as well as the person who builds it. Such insights and the affinity for what you create are so valuable in marketing – especially in high-tech marketing.
For our company, we need to work together to make this easy on both the sides. Interviews clearly is a better way than the write-up. But then again, someone is going to be unhappy about their public speaking skills or on-camera appearance.