Today the blogging spotlight is on Fonteva.
They build software for different target clients, but it seems the common thread is that the clients are looking to operate a type of business; everything from memberships like associations and governments to nonprofits and ecommerce businesses.
The Fonteva software is built on Salesforce, which is really smart. That’s obviously a huge platform and I’m sure it’s helped Fonteva to become one of the companies recently included on the Inc. 500 list.
Fonteva is in an interesting situation. They have multiple target customer personas to target and that makes for a blogging strategy that is a little more challenging.
Let’s look at how they’re approaching that blogging strategy.
1. Four Different News/Blog Sections
It can make sense to have different news or blog sections for different purposes.
Fonteva has four different sections for providing updates:
This is common practice for many businesses. The other option would be to put all the different updates you provide on a single archive page or blog and separate the different sections with categories or even with tags.
I’ve seen it done commonly in both ways. I think more are leaning toward the category option today since it can be a little cleaner, easier to understand for readers and easier to manage for the company.
But if you’ve already created different sections you can leave it that way, but if you would want to change it over to the category setup it wouldn’t be too terribly difficult.
And after a second look it seems that Fonteva might be using some type of category. If you go to this archive page of their blog it includes posts from the blog and from the news sections.
2. Main Blog Page Design
I wanted to touch on the interesting design Fonteva is currently using on their main blog page. It’s a little different than what you might find on a standard business blog.
You can see on their main blog page or main blog archive page where you find the latest posts that it’s a little more visual than your usual blog.
You have the big header at the top letting you know where you are on the site. And if you’re the leader of an association you know that you’re in the right place.
There is a featured post area at the top to highlight the very latest post or a post that the company wants to feature for a while.
Then you have the latest posts laid out in a very visual way. They use featured images and the titles. There aren’t descriptions or social sharing info or anything like that.
It’s different and I kind of like it. We’re starting to see more of this design and I think it works well.
Fonteva still has a more ordinary archive page for the blog. So you can compare and see what you like best. I think either works well.
3. Surveys And Client Information
We’ve talked about using client information and information you have from inside your company before in our analysis of business blogs.
Fonteva is doing a great job of it so it’s worth mentioning again.
In this post they’re going over survey information. The survey is one from the industry instead of being Fonteva’s own survey, but it’s a really great example of what you can do with industry information.
There are usually surveys and studies done in just about any industry. And when that information is released you want to pull out the most interesting parts and provide some perspective for your target audience.
Doing so helps your audience in two ways:
First, you take the time to review the survey and provide the best information. You save your reader the time from reading the entire survey.
Second, you can provide action steps and your thoughts on what the survey findings mean. This gives your reader something to do.
In both instances you’re providing value and earning the trust of potential customers.
The next step here would be to do internal surveys and to use internal information. Once your company gets big enough you can start giving out stats like:
75% of our clients use XYZ software to help with their operations management.
You can keep the surveys anonymous, but usually clients are curious what others are doing. And when you blog information in this way you’ll often attract shares and links from others online.
4. Building On Great Industry Posts
Here is a post on word of mouth. That’s a great topic for a post.
What Fonteva did for this post was find a great post on word of mouth marketing and provide a summary. This can be a great way to supplement your blog with great content.
You’re providing a service by finding some really great material for your audience.
The way to take it to the next level would be to take inspiration from that great post and to try and provide something new and different on the topic. You can say that that first post does a really great job with the angle on triggers and user-generated content and find other angles that haven’t been covered as much, but that are still useful to your audience.
It’s more work, but helps position your company as one of the leading sources of information for your target audience in your industry.
5. Targeting Specific Target Audiences
Fonteva has the difficult task of targeting multiple different audiences with their blog. I think this blog is all about associations. That might have been their first target audience and now they’re growing into other industries.
Here is a post on tax day advice for associations.
A couple tips on how to organize your blog if you write for multiple different target audiences.
First, you can mention the target audience in the title like Fonteva did with that post. This separates the posts into their proper categories.
You could also separate your blog with categories that are for the different target audiences. In Fonteva’s case that could be Associations, Small Businesses, Governments, Etc.
You could also have a general category for posts that are for all the audiences. These could be topics that are useful and interesting for each and you can leave out the mention in the titles and keep it generic with broad appeal.
Conclusion
Fonteva is doing a lot of great things with their business blog. They’re publishing about 1-3 posts per week on their blog, which is great. They’re publishing a lot of different content.
Hopefully the overview of a few key points above will help you as you work on your business blog. A blog is one of the best ways to attract new visitors and potential clients to your websites. Fonteva is a good example to use if you wan to succeed with your efforts.