Blogging Analysis: Hudl

Hudl Blog Analysis
Hudle helps coaches and teams with video.

I’ve been a sports fan for as long as I can remember.

When I was a kid I loved playing sports. I was always out in the yard with some kind of ball tossing it around and playing games with friends.

Where I grew up the big sports for kids where football, baseball and basketball. The first team sport we had in my town was little league baseball. From what I remember I was pretty good and I do remember that when I was 11 or so that my team won our age division.

For some reason I remember we were sponsored by the local A&W Root Beer stand. That’s a great sponsor. Root Beer Floats after every win.

Anyway, because of that background I was excited to look at Hudl and their blogging strategy today. They have a couple different blogs.

Basically, their product is a software that allows sports organizations at many levels to better analyze tape or footage. It could be of practice or games or whatever. Teams use the tape to see themselves and others and learn from what they see and what their coaches tell them.

So that’s Hudl in a real quick synopsis. But now let’s look at their blogging strategy.

1. Event Recap

It looks like Hudl puts on a fun event each year with coaches called Hudl Up. And they did a recent post to recap it.

These recap posts are always a good idea if your company is putting on events.

The recaps are good for a few reasons and here are two.

First, you have the people that attended. They were there taking in all the great information, but depending on the setting it can be difficult to remember everything. There’s always that thing you want to do, but you can’t remember what it was called. With a recap post that person can find all the information and links they need.

Second, for the people that weren’t able to attend they can still get all the great information…or at least most of it. And that’s appealing to current clients that weren’t there, but also to potential clients that might want the service in the future.

Events like this have so much great content so it’s smart to take some of that content and turn it into a blog post where it will live forever for people to find on the site.

2. Talking About Clients And Users

I love these kinds of posts. This is just one example of what Hudl did with the concept recently.

Basically they did these really long posts recapping how well teams did in their basketball championship tournaments. The catch was that the teams included had to be users of Hudl.

So it’s a great way to kind of show off the value in the product without really taking a bragging approach. That’s what just about every business loves to do. It’s always more fun to talk about the success of your clients instead of your own success.

And potential clients prefer reading this type of case study too.

I really like the personal touch they added meaning that the language is conversational. And there is real emotion in the descriptions with the stories about teams finding redemption. It’s great.

Blogs aren’t a place to be total suit and tie business. You can keep it casual, emotional and personal.

3. Fun Posts

I don’t talk enough about fun and entertaining posts her in this analysis. But Hudl certainly did that with this recent post that also tied in nicely to the NFL draft.

The concept was that it was the draft and the players will now be big stars in the NFL, but they had to get their start somewhere. So Hudl actually went back and compiled a collection of footage from some of the star players from their high school days.

It seems now that Hudl focuses mostly on those high school level teams and coaches. So that’s a neat way to touch back on that aspect of their business by showing how today’s stars were once in high school.

All the tie-ins are there: high school, video, the draft. It’s great.

And it’s fun. It’s also great to see Hudl include all the relevant information as text. That’s very useful to go along with the video.

4. How To, Tips And Checklists

Now we’re getting into the posts that really provide useful information. I wrote that wrong. All these posts are great and helpful, but this one is directly helpful.

It offers a nice checklist that coaches can use for the preseason. I like the way Hudl sectioned it offer into different areas. And they included some links throughout.

People like checklists. I make them all the time for all kinds of things.

Coaches are no different. In fact, they might use checklists more than the average person. And that’s why this post should do well. It’ll definitely be great for current users even re-used in an email.

And for others that haven’t heard of Hudl yet I would think this checklist would be helpful. They know what they want to do for the most part, but it’s always good to double check on a list like this to make sure you’re not forgetting anything.

5. Going Behind The Scenes

I mentioned earlier that Hudl has another blog that I think is their more technical blog. I read a few posts…or tried to. It’s over my head, but I don’t think I’m the target audience.

Here is one example.

The point I want to mention is that it’s good to take people behind the scenes of the product. You can show them your philosophies and why you do the things you do. And you can show some of the how you do things.

People like seeing how the people they work with do the work at least on some level.

Final Thought

Hudle has a great strategy for their blog. They’re taking on different kinds of content. They could even do more of the type of content they’re doing, but that requires more bandwidth. I’m sure their target users would want more of this great content, but I think Hudl is doing a great job both on the quality and quantity.

It’s a great example of how a business can use a blog to help grow the brand and business.

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