SOCIAL MEDIA CASE STUDY: Designing and Executing a Company Blog

When the Apriso Corporation, headquartered in Long Beach, Calif., was looking to establish itself as a thought leader in an ever-changing manufacturing industry, the creation of a corporate blog became integral to that strategy.

Apriso provides sophisticated consulting services and software solutions to manufacturers, and its blog would provides an excellent forum for reaching a highly targeted audience. In a rapidly changing taking place in the industry, the Apriso team believed a blog would give them the opportunity to broadcast their expertise, enhance brand awareness and create a powerful tool to support the company’s sales efforts.

While many companies have blogs, creating one that consistently delivers quality and useful content is a challenge. Apriso had to figure out what critical information customers and potential customers were not receiving, how it could capture that audience and how to effectively deliver that content to its targets.

To get the development process rolling, lay the foundation for the blog and to identify the type of content that would produce the most bang for the buck, Apriso partnered with Gutenberg PR, and both teams created the following objectives: (1) Build thought leadership in the manufacturing industry, (2) Provide a community forum to discuss different facets of today’s global manufacturing transformation, and (3) Increase Web site traffic and visitors to apriso.com

Objectives: Apriso’s primary objective in creating a “Manufacturing Transformation” blog was to build thought leadership around significant changes and challenges currently in process within the manufacturing industry as it has become increasingly global. By positioning Apriso as a thought leader, the objective was to raise brand awareness while helping to support sales efforts during the often lengthy enterprise software sales process, which can take up to a year to complete.

The blog provides a community forum to discuss different facets of today’s global manufacturing transformation. Supply chain complexity, the pursuit of lower costs and ever increasing customer expectations has forced manufacturers to undergo a significant evolution – creating both opportunities and threats. The blog entries point to challenges that manufacturers are facing while offering suggestions and best practices

on how to resolve.

Another objective was to increase website traffic and visitors to www.apriso.com. The thought was that by “raising the tide” all ships will also be raised, including new prospects and greater interaction by existing prospects and customers. As part of this objective was the goal of increasing SEO rankings, with higher keyword links and content on the Apriso site, the thinking was that our ranking would increase for these terms too. Quite simply, the blog ultimately had to prove that it was a required component of Apriso’s lead generation “machine” and could hold its own compared to other programs on delivering new sales leads.

Strategy:

The strategy in creating and rolling out Apriso’s “Manufacturing Transformation” blog was to create a platform for the Company’s team of world-class manufacturing and supply chain operations experts can share their perspectives, latest news, experiences and best practices. Once a foundation of content has been established, the strategy was to then promote across a wide variety of social media and other venues, working to increase readership and, ideally, build a list of engaged readers that frequent the blog for current and future business challenges.

At the onset of the program, the team conducted an analysis of the manufacturing industry landscape to determine the types of blogs that currently existed, and their level of influence within the industry. We determined that there was a healthy number of pre-existing industry blogs on similar – but not identical – topics. However, amongst the competitors reviewed, none had a manufacturing IT blog that demonstrated a leadership position in the race to capture Apriso’s particular audience online. We believed this was due to content choices as well as poor marketing of the blogs, which were often difficult to find on the company’s website, and were based on topics that were not strategic or business-value focused.

One of the challenges that Apriso faces from a competitive front is that it is competing against some very large industry behemoths, including SAP, Rockwell, Siemens and GE. But, the manufacturing operations divisions tend to be small in these large companies, so when it comes down to resources and marketing focus, Apriso is able to stand quite well on its own. It was for this reason that the Manufacturing Blog was seen as so strategic, as a way of clearly differentiating Apriso as being 100% focused on manufacturing versus the competition that has many other focus points other than manufacturing.

As expected, both Siemens and GE both have particularly personal blogs, focusing on “bring your child to work day”, corporate culture and personal experiences. However, none offered a resource for manufacturers to find answers to the globalization challenges they are now facing.

Lastly, part of the strategy to launch this blog was to convince internal management

team members that manufacturers actually read blogs, and that the target audience could potentially be impacted. This was a discussion that has led to several challenges to get this project started. Well-read industry bloggers have since verified that Apriso’s audience does indeed read blogs, including prospective clients. When one of the sales presentations was interrupted by a comment and question of a recent post by one of the attendees in the meeting, the blog quickly escalated in visibility and importance for the company.

To summarize, the overall strategy was to provide content that was relevant and cutting edge to a very highly targeted audience of manufacturing executives.

Tactics:

The team established the following tactics to make the blog a success:

Broad Range of Topics – At the onset of the program, the team established a range of topics covering everything from green manufacturing, to supply chain, to ERP integration, and so on. The purpose of the blog was to showcase Apriso deep industry knowledge by writing extensively on all pertinent issues affecting the manufacturing sector.

Build Support Internally – To make the blog a success, Apriso started small with a handful of bloggers, and was able to expand the roster to its current level, which includes 19 active bloggers, each covering a unique area of expertise. Apriso generally posts 2 blogs each week.

Build a Two-Way Street – A blog is only as successful as the conversations it sparks with key industry players. The team worked to secure guest blogs in various industry leading cites and publications, which would link back to the company blog. We also used the blog as a way to engage with our customers and inspire conversation between and among industry players. Following the Company’s “Community Day” event, Apriso hosted blogs that discussed key themes and issues, and noted how industry players were meeting current challenges.

Execution:

Of all the tasks associated with launching and building out the blog, execution was probably the toughest. It is one thing to achieve consensus that a blog is a good thing to do. It is quite another to keep up the pipeline of content week after week. One of the biggest challenges was what topics to write on, and what depth of subjects to “dive” down to. Would the posts be high level, or quite detailed, pertaining to topics that a person not involved in manufacturing might be challenged to read? We elected to go down the latter path, writing content that is highly targeted and in considerable depth that would really only be of interest to those that are actually in the industry.

The flip side of this execution meant that the content really had to come from a writer

that had a deep understanding of manufacturing operations. In other words, this was not an exercise in just trying to get keywords into a post to try and drive traffic and SEO benefits to the site. Apriso was trying to build a collection of meaningful posts that were truly inspirational, relevant and applicable to those in the field. As a result, it became necessary to solicit feedback from a few analysts and other experts in the field to come up with new topics, which the PR team could then coordinate with the Apriso team of writers to first establish a relevant topic, and then to help get the blog post started. When working with folks responsible for sales in the organization, it is sometimes difficult to convince them to put that task down and sit down and write a blog post. This was easily the most difficult aspect of the execution of this strategy, and one that is still challenging today.

Results:

The number of page views of the blog tripled in the first year of execution

Monthly unique visitors to Apriso’s Web site increased 65%.

From an SEO perspective, Apriso went from not appearing on page one for searches on topics and keyword combinations critical to Apriso’s business for most of 2011, to achieving a ranking of No. 2 or No. 3 on page 1 for those same terms.