Five Benefits Your Ghost-Blogger Can Never Deliver

In nature there is no right or wrong, only consequences.

Ghost-blogging isn’t misrepresentation. It’s a missed opportunity.

Even worse, if your business blog is ghost-written, it’s a missed opportunity in which you’re investing precious marketing dollars.

The mistake arises when business leaders assume blogging is the latest way to make marketing communications appear chic and up-to-date. As a result, they approach their blog like every other marketing tool in their arsenal. It becomes another receptacle for promoting the corporate message, only with the addition of a “personal face” slapped over it.

A ghost-written corporate blog often reflects the same me-too marketing attitude that leads to cookie-cutter web copy, ersatz press releases and boilerplate brochures. The rush to join the blogosphere translates to the blog’s regular content: Rather than take time to develop a personal voice and perspective, executives hire someone else to crank out content under the assumption that high-frequency posts indicates an abundance of wisdom and authority.

Social media advocates have spent a lot of pixels to call ghost-blogging inauthentic, and even unethical. These charges seem a bit dramatic to me. It’s enough to call ghost-blogging ineffective.

First, I tend to doubt that most ghost-written executive blogs attract a loyal following or deeply engaged readers. Even if they do, the most important relationship on a blog is between readers and content, not readers and the by-lined author. That’s why people say content, not authenticity, is king.

So, I won’t go so far as to say ghost-blogging never works. Some executives work closely with their ghosts to develop a strategic and uniform message for their business blog. They remain invested in the content, and take ownership for it.

The problem is that there are far more effective ways to communicate the corporate message, especially with the help of ghost-writing talent.

Regardless of how it’s applied, blogging is by nature a personality-driven medium. Yes, content matters. But take a look at which blogs influence a large, loyal and chatty following. The majority of them aren’t ghost-written company mouthpieces. Rather, they showcase the immediate and personal perspective of a charismatic blogger, and his or her following.

So, the problem isn’t blogging, or ghost-writers. It’s combining the two, which puts them at odds with each other. It’s a misapplication of marketing tactics, not strategy.

If your goal is to increase the visibility, credibility and authority of your business or its executives, and you wish to leverage the talents and logistical benefits of a ghost-writer, then the most appropriate marketing medium is an emailed newsletter.

Regularly emailed e-newsletters allow all of the logistical benefits of a ghost-writer, and carry far more value as a marketing tool than a blog. Among the benefits:

1. A more realistic schedule: Whether published weekly, monthly or quarterly, newsletters are simpler to plan and coordinate with a ghost-writer. Also, their regularity promotes more focused communications: Most businesses can find one or two items of genuine interest to report every month.
2. More active outreach: Rather than driving people to your blog, a newsletter brings content to the people.
3. A well-defined funnel: Since most newsletters require registration, they can more clearly define the scope and characteristics of people at the top of your marketing-to-sales funnel.
4. Better tracking: Blog analytics tell you a lot about your audience, but a hyperlink-rich newsletter can tell you more about what motivates individual audience members to take action.
5. No comment: The authenticity issue with ghost-bloggers congeals in a blog’s comments section, where readers can engage with the perceived author. No matter how talented your ghost-writer, he or she is poorly qualified to interact on your behalf. A newsletter not only eliminates this issue, it relegates any unwelcome reader perspective to the privacy of an email response.

Bottom line: Ghost-blogging is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is ineffective application of sound marketing tools. Fortunately, there’s a cure: Put your ghost-writer to work where he or she won’t create unnecessary and often counterproductive layers between you and the audience.

When Should Content Be Free?

Photo credit: kalandrakas

I’m not asking. Ann Handley of MarketingProfs is. Specifically, she raised the question last week on OPEN Forum, an oddly titled site since it’s only open to American Express cardholders. Even so, I recommend reading Ann’s post here. You’re welcome to offer your own thoughts below (credit cards welcome, but not required).

To summarize, Ann correctly posits two approaches to distributing your eBooks and white papers:

1. You can require interested readers to register their name, email and contact information before they access your content, or
2. You can offer content free for download, thereby encouraging readers to share it and hopefully turn it viral, thereby generating maximum exposure for minimum expense

I can see how the latter possibility would appeal to marketing types. Who would turn down bragging rights for an article that’s become the darling of the chatocracy? As Ann explains, marketers are disinclined to hide content behind a registration wall because “the real goal is visibility with your audience.”

I respectfully disagree. Visibility is the mission of advertising, not marketing. Admittedly there’s some overlap here. But the desire for content to “go viral” falls squarely on advertising’s side of the advertising-marketing Venn diagram.

Content goes viral because it promotes a shared emotion, experience or attitude, which is fundamentally what advertising aims to achieve for a brand. In a sense, the role of advertising is to feed marketing, and the role of marketing is to feed sales.

So, is content more valuable when it’s behind a registration wall, or when it’s set free to propagate on the internet.

I’m wondering why this is an either/or question. In researching this post, I referred to blog posts and slideshares of Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. Interestingly, I found he cited two almost identical statistics that seem to contradict one another.

In the first, Brian wrote on his blog that registered content could drive away 75 to 85 percent of potential leads.

In the second, he notes in a slideshare that 80% of marketing expenditures on lead generation are lost, ignored or discarded by sales. Among the top reasons, he cites, are that leads aren’t properly qualified or prioritized.

So, maybe the question should be how to qualify leads without scaring away prospective customers.

The answer isn’t a matter of which approach is better, but rather which approach applies, and when.

It’s unwise, for instance, to demand registration for content early in the buying process when customers are beginning to gather information about you and your competitors. High-level perspective, such as industry articles, buyer’s guides, web copy and case studies help customers place your value against a larger context.

This content should be offered gratis.

Make it easy for prospects to get educated about what questions to ask. You build trust by making it safe to learn those questions from you.

As customers move further along the buying process, their questions become more knowledgeable and specific. They’re better equipped to recognize content of value to their research. If you’ve already built trust by helping them learn what questions to ask, they’re more likely to submit a name or an email in exchange for more specialized content.

Carroll makes an excellent point about minimizing prospects’ commitment during the process. He recommends using a series of “micro-conversions:” requiring an email for a white paper here, a job title for an article there. Eventually, by enabling prospects to educate themselves, you’re also compiling a profile to help guide sales to close the deal.