What’s the Best Prescription for Posting to Your Blog? Is it QD, BID or PRN?

                                                                   
               “…RSS fatigue is already setting in…” Seth Godin

 I can think of many things where more is better. A few things that come to mind are:

·         The number of karats in a diamond

·         The number of people you know that you can call upon when the “chips are down”

·         The number of mornings you can remember when you really took a moment to enjoy a new day with all of its possibilities

·         The number of times you said, “I’d never do that” (like parachute from an airplane) but you did it anyway and loved it

·         The number of times you took the high road when taking the low road was oh so tempting

But there are many things in life where less is more. We may each have our own list of what those are but one thing that is probably pretty common is the number of blogs that hit your inbox/feed daily by the same blogger.

I haven’t decided what the cause of this “too frequent blog posting phenomenon” is but here are a few theories I found while researching the topic and a few of my own.

Why do people post blogs daily and think that people will read them - daily?

·         There is a lack of understanding of human nature – none of us read anything every day unless it is from our maker, our boss, our loved one, a client or maybe a book we can’t put down (yes, I intentionally left out the newspaper since most people do not read the paper anymore and if they do, they do not read it from cover to cover like my dad did!)

·         In this relatively new era of freedom to communicate one’s thoughts with the masses, some may begin to think that others need to hear their thoughts daily

·         There is a misguided understanding that blogging is a replacement for “cold calling” and the more we write, the more chance we have that someone will read it and reply, take action or evangelize our brand

It is suggested that there is a connection to the quantity of posts to the volume of traffic. However, as seasoned marketers know, you want to choose quality over quantity every time. If you are using your blog for branding, you want loyal readers. You drastically raise the stakes on losing those loyal readers if you bombard them with too much information. They will tune out, log off and unsubscribe.  

If you are using your blog as a lure to get traffic on your page because you are advertising anything and everything on your site then you are hoping that you will create more ‘clicks’ on ads that pay you by hyper-posting. If this is the case, you probably aren’t writing for a loyal audience and you might want to consider some less work intense ways of driving traffic to your site. Blogging can be work. Try keywords, links, ads and other traffic generation tricks. It might work just as well for you and you might not offend true blog readers by filling up their ‘head space’ by over-posting to the same audience.  

So what is the right prescription for blog posting? I think your safest bet is PRN  (as needed). When you have something to say to the audience you are or want to reach… then say it. Don’t post just to post. We’ve all been guilty of saying too much too often, but I know that I get the best response when I write less frequently and only when I have something to say to my audience of SMBE’s and entrepreneurs. I also know that people I may initially “follow” get tossed in the Junk Mail or Block Sender Folders when I receive daily messages that clog my brain. The sad thing about that is that some of these things might be good for me to read, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to read all of it.

So, when it comes to the right prescription for blog posting, I think that substance over quantity will help all of us  to achieve true communication with those who we are trying to help, educate, engage, or…..

Related Articles: How Often Should a Blogger Post by Darren Rowse

                               The Noisy Tragedy of Blog Commons by Seth Godin

Behavioral Target Marketing or A/B Testing – A Head Scratcher

I just read an article that pitted these two tactics against each other and asked which was better.

I scratched my head on this one. Why forego either?

If I’ve learned anything in my 20+ years of marketing, operations and management (which I view very connected, btw) it is that ‘getting it right’ is like peeling an onion. And if you can, you peel two or three layers at once and see where your highest gain is.

Example: If I had both options  behavioral marketing and A/B testing available to me, I’d use both!  Many times with clients I will recommend a tactic and they automatically assume (and most state) that I am ruling out other tactics. The truth is that couldn’t be further from the truth!

When I’ve done campaigns with behavioral data available to me, I still do an A/B test to a small, but statistically relevant group before I launch the campaign. Why use one tactic when you can test, use both tactics and identify the winner?

To get the very best ROI for my clients or company, I want to make sure that when I “pull the trigger” with the big gun (the campaign budget) that I am confident that I have identified the very best strategy. I want to yield the highest return that I can and this can be an area to navigate with some clients or management folks.

Unless you’ve used all forms of marketing (online and offline), selecting one tactic for the desired outcome is risky. Plus, depending upon your product or service, you may truly need an integrated approach to completely ‘touch’ all of your prospects. Many times, one size does not fit all.

I love having behavioral data at my fingertips. However, you will not find the golden key that unlocks the door to all of your customers. You will find identifiers which can help you with imaging, placement, messaging and more, but you should try at least an A/B test of differing approaches that fit within the characteristics of the behavioral data and see which one wins.  If you get a true front runner, that’s your winner and launch your campaign with the winner. Sometimes though you will find the results similar and this tells you that you’ve hit good messaging and look back to the responders and see what differs between the A responders to the B responders and then peel your data back one more layer and separate the “A type” from the “B type”.

For example, let’s say you find that the A responders were in a different geo target than the B responders. It would be silly to hit both geo areas with the same media. By testing behavioral data, you can enhance the data and thereby increase intelligence to the data for further campaigns.