One of the things I’ve noticed among those in business is that they always want to know what’s happening in the industry.
From a first look, Bottlenose, provides a service that shows you the trends happening right now. And you don’t have to go and look for those trends.
I also like the name, Bottlenose. They say they use their “SONAR” to find all those stories just like a dolphin I guess would find things using their senses in the water.
This is an example of big data and even real time data and one way it can be used today. We’re definitely living in the Information Age, but one of the problems with that is collecting and analyzing it all. So it’s obvious why a service like Bottlenose would quickly be gaining popularity.
But we’re not going to look so much at what they do for their clients today. We’re going to see what they’re doing to attract new clients with their blogging strategy.
Here are some thoughts.
1. Highlighting Big Company News
Right on the homepage, and you can see it in the image above, Bottlenose have really highlighted news of a recent investment in their company. This is pretty unique at least in the way they’ve brought attention to this right on their homepage.
The link goes to a press release off the site, but it could just as easily go to a blog post on the Bottlenose blog.
When you have major news like this you can feature that post in many different ways including on your homepage. I really haven’t seen too much of it, but it makes a lot of sense.
Your potential customers and partners want to know what’s happening with your business. When they chose your product and service they’re betting on your future. When you can share information on your vision and plans for the future it makes your customers more comfortable “investing” in your product.
So this is something pretty clever from Bottlenose.
2. What Our Users Are Saying
We have to go back a few years to find this post, but that’s okay. A good blogging strategy has a mix of content that is both timely and that lives forever. This way your old blog posts are truly assets that work to bring you traffic and new leads for years. You can keep sharing those posts on social and they’ll always be there in the search engines.
So this post is about what the Bottlenose customers are saying.
It’s pretty straightforward. You have a collection of what customers said about the Bottlenose Beta program a few years ago. Obviously it’s a little slanted toward Bottlenose’s favor, but that’s okay.
If you’re struggling to find something to blog about you can throw these in there from time to time. It’s a great way to use social media to your advantage.
You can do what Bottlenose did and simply share the content or you could take it a step further and add your own comments. Maybe users are asking questions. You could group certain tweets together and then offer a question or perspective.
3. Bottlenose In Action
Here is a more recent post where Bottlenose gets to show off their product. They look at a marketing strategy that Game Of Thrones did. They analyze how fans were reacting online and it provided some really interesting stuff. You can see how people were feeling all kinds of emotions.
Obviously this would be really difficult to track if you were trying to do it without a tool like Bottlenose. And that’s why this kind of post is so valuable. It gives Bottlenose the chance to show the smart strategy that another company did while using the Bottlenose program. You kind of get to show off your own stuff while talking about someone else.
4. Repost
Here is a simple repost blog post. Bottlenose has done this a couple times where they’ve linked to a post where they’ve been mentioned. It’s a good strategy on your own blog. You can show a little love to the people that have written about you.
I would mix this into a strategy, but would keep it to a pretty low percentage. It provides value, but you’re not really adding your own content to the world for your audience to find valuable. So it’s good, but keep it just a small part of your overall blogging strategy.
5. Product Updates
Finally, we have a post from a few years ago that goes through a product update for Bottlenose. Earlier we looked at how Bottlenose promoted something that discussed their future and this post kind of does that as well.
Announcements are good especially when it’s about your product and what it can do for your customers. The more detail and imagery you can add the better in the case of these posts. I think Bottlenose did a great job and it’s a great example of a product update-type blog post.
Conclusion
Bottlenose is doing a lot of great things with their business blog as we’ve looked at over the last few points. The only things I would recommend to them would be to maybe change up their URL structure to something that uses the title of the post. I would recommend a more regular posting schedule. Perhaps one post per week.
And a good way to get to that regular schedule is to look for a bunch of questions that the target audience is asking in relation to the industry. That would be social media from an enterprise level. If you’re a large enterprise, like HBO in the example above, you’re going to be asking all kinds of questions about marketing and social media and even more. Bottlenose can provide insight into those areas and answer those common questions on the blog.
It’s good to have a focus on your business and your products, but you need to go more general to attract the audience that doesn’t know your brand exists yet.