And So I Began Blogging

If you read our Who We Are page, you’ll see a comment about us being earlier adapters of blogging. I personally have been blogging for many years and I was doing it well before it was considered mainstream or cool. At the time, I was the geek who spent her time – aka wasting her time – blogging. I worked for a small software company and I was the VP of marketing. I was the marketing budget. I was paid well and my salary was the sum of our marketing budget. No advertising, no outside web firm, no SEO specialist, nothing. If I wanted something to happen I had to do it myself. So I began blogging. And blogging helped give the company a 400% sales growth in two years. I was crazy in the minds of our decision maker and president. But he let me go and he let me be free. He gave me freedom to allocate my time where I deemed appropriate. He gave me autonomy and that independence brought out the blogger in me and helped drive sales growth.

In my head and heart I know blogging is critical to internet marketing. This is especially true if you are an employee of a technology company. I was back then and the woman I spoke with a week ago is too. I know B2B tech marketing. I did it for ten years and I know what works. Blogging works and I know it. It works for B2C and it works for B2B. It just works. In today’s world, to not blog is to not market. To not blog, it to not SEO.

Blogging is powerful. I’ve written a lot content for our website but they are pages. They are static and they are, well, boring. Blogging is real. When you read one of my blog posts, you are reading me. It doesn’t matter if I’m blogging about ERP software like I did years ago or about WordPress web design like I do now. I blog about past events or about the thoughts in my head about tomorrow. I blog about real life and about what matters to me. And in many cases, this reaches out and connects with someone. It connects because it is personal and because it comes from within.

It’s why I’m sitting on my first morning of vacation, writing and working. I’m passionate about my company and what my company can do to help others. I believe in blogging, just as much as I believe in my company. I believe both can help change the world, because it helps connect with that world via the internet. To not blog, is to not market. To not blog, is to give up.

I don’t want to give up on the woman I spoke with on the phone. I sent her a proposal for SEO and it included blogging. For her company to succeed on the internet, they have to turn their stale, three year old website into a fresh, blogging machine. They need to connect with their target market, their prospects, and their future customers.

My Blog Post is My Loon Call

As I type on my Mac I hear the loon in the background. The loon and his call is one of the reasons why I awake early. I enjoy his call and his connection. I’m not a loon and my voice doesn’t have the same beauty as the loon. But I can blog and at times my blog posts do. I’ve connected with people, with strangers, and I’ve made an impact. I know this is true because I’ve found many clients and customers through blogging and I’ve been doing it for many years. I’ve gone to trade shows and encountered people who read my blog and followed me and my company because of it. And when I left my old employer to launch my own consulting company, those people – my blog readers – came with me as clients of my new company. It’s been two years since I launched Web Savvy Marketing and I still have my ERP peeps show up as new clients. I’m building a website and long-term SEO campaign for one right now. The president knew me and my marketing expertise, because he read my blog posts years ago. That is powerful and more powerful than virtually anything else you can do in marketing.

I started my consulting firm in the midst of a recession. Looking back I now see quitting my corporate job to follow my passion was a major risk. It was somewhat crazy given the fact that I lived in Michigan and our state was going through the worst economic turmoil I could ever remember. In my heart I knew my company would succeed. I knew this even though no one else did. Somehow I knew I could do it and I could find clients outside of Michigan until our local economy shifted. My husband had faith in me and I had faith in the internet. When he asked me how I was going to find clients, I told him I was going to blog and blogging would bring me clients. My husband, the good man that he is, said he had no clue what I meant but that he had faith in me and he knew I could do it. And he was right. I could and I did. The company I created on faith is growing and expanding and surpassing anything I had imagined or had hoped for originally. While my husband will attribute this to my marketing knowledge and desire to help people, I attribute this success to the power of the blog and the ability of my blog posts to connect, to inspire, and to bring forth new business.

If you look at the dates of my blog posts, you’ll see an interesting trend. I blog and publish a number of posts and then nothing. I go quiet. I go quiet because every time I blog regularly, I obtain a bunch of new clients and then I get to busy to blog for a while. Once I get these companies quoted and moving along with my team, I have time to blog again and my cycle begins again. This drives my husband insane and he tends to view it was a broken process. I view this as a success and know this trend illustrates the indisputable power of the blog post.

After college I found a temporary position at a barcode and data collection distribution and before I knew it, I was a full-time employee running their operations.  Why?  Because I fell in love with the ERP system they installed three months before my arrival.  That and the fact that I was one of the few employees who “got” new their ERP system.  I didn’t just get it, I embraced it with my entire being.  For the next three years I worked 60-80 workweeks and spent much of my time on the applicable.  And while it wasn’t perfect, it helped me manage a national distributor with multiple branches and distribution centers.  Again, I was in love with my job and my ERP software.  To this day I miss the chaos and the challenge of fixing every operational woe with my ERP system.

Flash forward fifteen years and I’ve moved from my first college job through working ten years for an ERP developer and now I run my own Internet marketing company.  The trouble is my love for marketing and ERP rarely seem to connect as much as I would like.    While a VP of marketing at an ERP developer, I myself struggled with managing marketing via my ERP system.  While I lived off my personalized dashboards and workbenches, I used a lot of offline processes to help manage what my beloved ERP software could not.  Don’t get me wrong; I knew exactly where each lead came from, where it was at in our sales process, and how long the sales cycle should take before new business was closed.  I had lead generation and tracking, but I lacked the ability to proactively manage marketing.  Within my ERP software, everything I did for marketing felt reactive, which is not at all, what marketing is supposed to be.

Honestly, I don’t think I’m alone.  While I doubt there are many marketing people reading this blog entry, I know they would concur with me if they did.   And I don’t believe ERP developers have reached the concept of automating marketing enough to work hard at developing strong marketing content for their user community.  They are side tracked with fuel surcharges, customer service needs, and compliance issues.  And really, who listens to marketing people anyway?  We are overhead plain and simple.

Today I received a feed from Web Strategy by Jeremiah.  He was covering CRM software (aka ERP software) and the newer functionality for social media management.  Yes, social media, the new darling of topics on the Internet.  Social media reminds me so much of ERP software, because just like a complicated ERP system, few people get it.  They think you can throw up a Facebook page or Twitter account and call it good.  Not so fast.  Just like an integrated ERP system, your social media accounts are fully integrated with your overall marketing campaign and search engine optimization.  There are rules to follow and there are reasons why you do what you do on Twitter versus Facebook.  Honestly, I think you either get it or you don’t.  I always felt the same about ERP software.  You need to look past your little piece of the ERP pie and you need to look into the entire pie or organization to see how your data input alters another department, process, or users.  Social media is the same.  Your tweet on Twitter will alter other marketing activities.  Good or bad.  The Twitter community is persnickety and they speak differently than Facebook or MySpace.  Make a mistake and you will be ignored or blocked.  Do the same in an ERP application and you’d just lose your program access.

Okay I’m running off track here a bit.  I have to really question the blog entry by Jeremiah, because I truly question if the ERP developers and their programmers get social media and marketing.  I question if they can truly meet the needs of marketing departments and look beyond a simple project plan, marketing budget, or lead-tracking program.  Marketing, and in particular Internet marketing, is like voodoo.  Hard to quantify and difficult to measure results, yet something I believe in.  Okay I don’t believe in voodoo, but I did catch your attention.  I do believe in successful marketing and I do believe in ERP software.

So Jeremiah, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Salseforce – do you really get it?  Are you writing software code that your marketing department lives and breathes by or are you writing code that helps your salespeople sell your ERP software?  Ask yourself the question, then ask a marketing person who understands both their functional role and your ERP software. The answer may surprise you.