Call centers remain an important aspect of many organizations.
In my previous job, the call center was busy all the time taking in orders from catalogs. Even as the Internet became more of a purchasing space, customers still called in to make order from catalogs. For many, it was more comfortable.
And for other businesses, call centers are the main way to generate sales. It might be cold calling and following up on inquiries and leads. This can be done in new online forms, but calling is still highly effective.
Today we’re looking at LeadDesk. They provide a cloud-based call center software solution. It allows business to handle their entire call center efforts. It keeps things organized, allows for analyzing and provides businesses with a way to make more money with their call center efforts.
But as we always do we’re going to look at their blogging strategy (LeadDesk Blog).
1. News vs. Blog
LeadDesk is a good example of how News and Blog sections on a site can be interchangeable. I see companies calling their blogs one or the other. Some companies will use “news” as a category along with things like “tips” and other topics for posts.
There isn’t really a set rule for what to call your business blog. Calling it a Blog seems to be more common based on my experience. And readers in general understand what a blog is – something where they can get fresh information about the company, industry, etc.
The one thing to do would be to choose the option you like best and make sure that is how the blog is branded. So if you decide on blog then make sure to use blog in the URL, the heading on the page, in the navigation, in any links to the page, etc.
That will lead to less confusion for readers and for visitors looking through your site.
2. Frequency
For the last few quarters, LeadDesk has been committing to about one post per month. And that’s not too bad. It looks like the blog has been active going back to about 2013. So they’ve been committed to blogging for a few years. And that’s more than many are willing to stick with the effort.
Business blogging can be frustrating because it can take time to build traffic to the posts especially with organic search. Frequency plays a roll and so does the length of your commitment. If you stop blogging at any point you’ll always have the posts you’ve created, but it will be difficult to continue to build your authority in the industry with content, which helps traffic including with organic search.
For our clients, we recommend at least one post a month and weekly posts if possible. Usually the struggles are finding ideas for posts and then finding the time to create the posts.
We like to separate the brainstorming from the writing. So we’ll brainstorm 10-12 ideas a time or every 2-3 months. Then schedule a time each week for writing the post. This seems to help with avoiding the dreaded writers block.
3. Content Upgrades
Something that has been around for a while, but that is becoming more common with business blogs is the Content Upgrade. It’s something that you can place on your blog and within blog posts that is usually a different form of content. Typically, you ask for something like an email address and when a reader opts-in they immediately get an email with a PDF or video or whatever the content upgrade is.
To succeed, the content upgrade usually needs to go beyond what your typical blog post offers. You still want to provide good answers to the questions your target clients are asking with your blog posts, but you can provide more content on the topic with a content upgrade.
An example can be found with this post on LeadDesk. They put together a handy fact sheet for businesses that are curious about dialer modes.
And the post still provides good information while the fact sheets offers more information on the topic in a different format.
I’ve seen golf instructors do a good job with content upgrades. They put together instruction courses. For example, the most common fault in golf is taking the club to the inside on the backswing and swinging outside on the downswing, creating a slice.
So the instructor might share weekly tips for a variety of faults in the golf swing. In each post they link to their 5-Step Slice Eliminator Video Series. Readers signup and get the course in their inbox. And at the end the instructor offers customer lessons or something like that.
4. Best Practices
The term “best practices” often gets overused. Some people are sick of reading that term. And sometimes best practices are meant to be broken. But I think best practices are typically a good thing to understand. Even if you know your industry inside and out there are always new things to learn. And seeing what others consider best practices or the must-know aspects of the industry is good to make sure you’re not forgetting important things.
LeadDesk has a post on their blog about voicemail best practices. This is a great post. Business leaders that have call centers would be interested in seeing if they’re using voicemail in the best way possible. LeadDesk obviously has lots of experience with call centers so their advice on voicemails is respective and authoritative. They can use their own knowledge from experience and also do some digging on the topic, which it seems like they did.
A very valuable post for the target reader.
5. Surveys
This was a cool post from LeadDesk that went over an industry survey.
Surveys are a great tool to gather industry information. As a business, you can look for the surveys in your industry and provide recaps on your blog.
Often, the best way to do this would be to pull out a certain number of important items and provide you analysis and commentary. You don’t usually ant to recap the entire survey. But pulling out 3-10 items and covering those is good especially if the survey is long.
You’re providing two important things for readers:
First, you’re taking the time to read the survey and you’re pulling out the the most important content. Your reader now doesn’t need to do that work.
Second, you’re providing your analysis and insight. Readers will read the survey results and take their own conclusions from it, but they’re also curious to see what others in the industry gathered.
You can also do your own surveys if you can’t find good ones in your industry. This would be taking your business to a new level as a leader or thought leader or authoritative figure in the industry.
Conclusion
LeadDesk is doing some really good things with their blog. I really like that they did the post recapping the industry survey. Those types of posts are usually very valuable to readers. And if the survey is regular, like annually, you can do a recap post each year.
And the other areas of the blog are good as well. If you’re looking at investing more in your own business website and blog then looking at what LeadDesk is doing would be a good place to start.