What Should Technology Marketing Managers Blog About?

In some IT companies, you'll find full time blog managers. But more often than not, it's technology marketing managers -- wearing a lot of different hats -- that need to figure out what to blog about.

Once you've decided that blogging needs to be a big part of your marketing mix for attracting website visitors, converting visitors into leads, and closing leads into customers, you need to develop an editorial calendar that helps you reach your goals.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Questions asked by your clients - When doing your persona research, you should've uncovered dozens, if not hundreds, of questions that your ideal buyers seek answers to. There's also likely a treasure trove of questions sitting in your customer service department or help desk database. Turn each and every one of these into separate blog posts that are ever-so-slightly search optimized (SEO’d) around a long-tail keyword phrase. For example: "What should technology marketing managers blog about?"

2. Questions asked by your prospects - Get your sales team involved in brainstorming blog post ideas based on the questions they hear most among potential clients. Each and every question should be turned into its own blog post.

3. Industry news - Think about the platforms and verticals that your company specializes in. As your internal subject matter experts come across big news events and announcements related to what your company does best, record and write up a basic Q&A style interview around his or her analysis of what this news means to your client base.

4. Expanded blog comments - The more you blog and the more you promote your blog posts, the more likely it is that you'll see particularly noteworthy blog comments. Besides using blog comments as a way to interact with readers and deepen relationships, individual comments and comments collectively on a single post can often be easily expanded to future blog posts. Just make sure you add your own spin and analysis to avoid creating duplicate content that could be subject to a search engine penalty.

5. Premium content excerpts - Over time, most technology marketing managers end up creating and publishing lots of premium content offers to meet their lead generation goals. Most content like this -- eBooks, white papers, and webinars to name a few -- can be easily excerpted into blog posts that help promote the premium content and generate leads.

6. Curated lists of other bloggers' posts - Within the IT space, we often see bloggers publishing curated lists of posts from other bloggers. Most of the time, this looks something like “X [Topic Name] Blog Posts that We Didn't Write.”

7. Posts summarizing and analyzing YouTube videos - Whether written about your company's own YouTube videos, or other YouTube videos of interest to your prospects and clients, these kinds of blog posts are usually easy to write and become inherently "stickier" when you embed the YouTube video directly into the body of the blog post.

8. Posts summarizing and analyzing SlideShare presentations - Whether written about your company's own SlideShare presentations, or other SlideShare presentations of interest to your prospects and clients, these kinds of blog posts are usually easy to write and become inherently "stickier" when you embed the SlideShare presentation directly into the body of the blog post.

9. Posts promoting upcoming webinars or offline events that you're presenting at - When you're holding your own webinar or seminar, you can search optimize the registration landing page to capture organic search interest in that particular topic. But when it's somebody else's webinar or seminar that you're speaking at, consider creating your own blog post so you too have an organic search-friendly asset to attract visitors to your website, that are interested in that particular topic. If blogging pre-event, leave yourself plenty of lead time. However blogging post-event can be even more effective over an extended time period if the topic is evergreen and the recording is available to non-attendees.

In this post, we've given technology marketing managers nine ideas for blog posts.

What's your favorite way to generate blog posts? And which kinds of blog posts have been most effective at attracting the right website visitors that convert into leads and ultimately close into profitable clients? Please share your thoughts with us in the Comments box below.

And to figure out how these blog post ideas can fit in with your bigger-picture content marketing plans, be sure to download your free copy of the IT Channel Inbound Marketing Guide. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr Search Engine People Blog