I don’t think it’s possible to do a study of the number of events every year around the world.
Maybe you could do it by industry in the business world.
It seems there is an event every week for every industry. You can visit just about any city around the world as events seem to circle the globe.
And that’s just in business.
There are even more events, it seems, for our personal lives. In the city where I live, Eau Claire, there is some kind of run or 5K at the city park every weekend. And that’s only running events.
Events are a great thing. People like them. It’s a chance to interact with others. It can be a chance to learn, to raise money and to accomplish a number of other things.
But how does everything get coordinated?
It takes really smart and really organized individuals. And it often takes full teams to make sure even small events go off with relatively few hitches.
Smart people have seen the need for event planning software recently and companies like etouches have come around to provide software to help events and their coordinators.
Today we’re going to look at etouches and how they’re using a business blog to build an audience and build their business.
1. Answering Questions
At Ghost Blog Writers, we approach every blog with the goal to answer questions for a target audience. We look at the questions the target audience is asking in relation to the industry the business is in and answer those questions the best we can with blog posts.
As in real life, when you answer questions people have you become a source of trusted information. People seek you out when they have questions and if you sell something they need or want they will often come to you first because they trust you.
A quick glance at the etouches blog will show that they focus on answering questions that events coordinators and managers have as it relates to event management.
Here are a few examples:
Question: How do I grow my event?
Blog Post: Grow Your Events With Your Social Media Community
Question: How do I improve my event website?
Blog Post: 3 Things To Change On Your Event Website
Question: How do I relieve some of the stress I get from planning my event?
Blog Post: 6 Ways For Event Planners To De-Stress
As you can see, those titles focus on some important and common questions that the target audience is asking. Those questions can be answered in different ways with different posts and that’s what etouches is doing on its blog.
2. Mistakes?
We’re human. We make mistakes.
That doesn’t mean that we like making mistakes. I don’t know if I know anything that does.
One thing you’ll come across with a blog is the strategy of focusing on mistakes with a few posts. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be negative. But you still want to focus on the questions your audience is asking.
And sometimes people ask what the mistakes are they should be worried about and how they can avoid the mistakes others have made.
That’s where you get posts like this one from etouches.
etouches has extensive experience with events. They’ve probably made mistakes themselves and they’ve probably seen mistakes at events. It’s okay if those mistakes happen and it’s okay to focus on what’s gone wrong in the past so that others can avoid those mistakes.
It’s a good type of post to include from time to time.
3. Guest Authors
I don’t think we’ve touched on having guest authors in a while, but this post from etouches reminded me of how that strategy can be a good one for a business blog.
This post and the overall strategy wins on a few levels.
First, etouches wins because they get expert insight for their blog.
Second, the guest author wins by getting access to the etouches blog audience. It’s a chance to answer a common question and earn trust.
Third, the target audience wins because they get one of their questions answered, which in this case is about taking an event a coordinator already has and starting an event just like it in other locations. Seems like a big question and the answer can be found in this post.
4. Formatting Blog Posts
The content in blog posts is important…obviously.
But there is a school of thought that design is just as or more important than the content.
Is it content or design?
It’s probably both and without one you probably won’t succeed in the long-term.
Let’s take a quick look at the design and format of a blog post on the etouches blog.
I think they do a good job with this one. The headings are a bit different, but they stand out. The font color is different so it’s easy to scan the article and go in for more depth. Headings turn a post that could be one big block of text into different sections. It’s more pleasant to the eye.
Overall, I like the design of the etouches blog posts. There is good use of white space. There aren’t too many things to distract you. That’s a problem with a lot of content websites today.
There’s a little issue with the formatted bullet list, but that’s a minor one. Overall, the post is designed well and that makes a big difference.
5. Stats
I’ve mentioned this before in the blog analysis series, but it’s worth point out again.
It’s good to use stats in posts. Stats help make your point more believable. It’s one thing for you to say something and hope that readers believe you, but you can really convince them if you have science to back it up.
etouches provides a nice stat in the intro of this post and I think that helps make the entire post more trustworthy.
Conclusion
It’s really cool to see how much etouches has invested in their blogging effort. It’s not easy to stick with a blogging strategy for how they have been at it. From the looks of it they’ve been doing it for several years. They’ve been taking the right approach too – they focus on the questions their target customers are asking and answering those questions with blog posts.
It’s really a simple approach, but it takes dedication to pull off. But those that commit to it can see the benefits.