how a blog post generated real business results

A blog post that made it

Behind the scenes of a blog post that drove business results

Situation:

• The Beyond PR blog was about 8 months old. We had decent traffic, but it was time to start showing some real business results from our efforts.

• The opportunity: Along came some interesting analytics data illustrating how press releases that included multimedia generated more views than plain text.

First step: an infographic

• Simply put, we had to illustrate this story.

• We worked with our marketing department to turn the data into an interesting visual.

Next, we wrote the blog post.

We promoted the blog post

• Twitter – via @prnewswire (employees tweeted it from their handles, too)

• Facebook

• LinkedIn

• SlideShare

• A press release

Hold up! You did a press release about a blog post?

Yep. It works really well – doubles our blog traffic, creates inbound links, and boosts subscriptions.

We love press releases.

The blog generated great traffic, buzz … and media coverage.

The business results: sales of multimedia services increased

• Our customers were newly aware of the effectiveness of using multimedia content to illustrate press releases

• Our sales team had interesting (and credible) new information to use to promote the services.

• We used this story as the hub for more content about using visuals in PR to keep the conversation going and the information fresh.

We’re geniuses!

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

No, really, we were just well organized.

But we did learn from the experience, and we have replicated this initial success.

Our formula for a successful blog post that delivers business results:

• Identify a useful story with tactical advice for your audience • Illustrate it • Write the blog post, calling out fact and offering tactical tips,

and linking to the associated product page. – Providing a call to action for interested readers is crucial

• Promote the blog post – social media, press releases, newsletters.

• Pitch the story to industry media & bloggers • Utilize the resulting content for newsletters and related

campaigns. • Rinse, and repeat.

Visit Beyond PR:

http://blog.prnewswire.com