- September 23, 2015
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Brand New: How to Lead in an Emerging Market
Every integrated marketer operating in a new industry faces the same dilemma: how to establish leadership in an emerging field.
For ServiceVirtualization.com, the path toward thought leadership involved a nuts-and-bolts integrated marketing strategy created by the inbound marketers at Idea Grove. Software developer CA Technologies created ServiceVirtualization.com as a content marketing platform to promote its service virtualization offering.
Although ServiceVirtualization.com experienced some traction in building awareness for this relatively new software engineering technology, the site proved to be too time consuming for contributors, who were all key people at CA Technologies. To see continued success, the software development behemoth refocused on expanding its base of contributors, improving readability and boosting search results.
Bring in Third-Party Experts
Idea Grove pursued the goals by repositioning ServiceVirtualization.com as a product-agnostic portal and introduced content from third-party experts – two techniques any size company trying to establish thought leadership could borrow.
In addition, Idea Grove deployed other integrated marketing tactics:
- Developed nonbranded content and expanded the product focus to include forums for users of competitive products
- Integrated chats and user groups to foster social interaction and community development
- Created an “Ask the Expert” section to respond to user questions
- Pursued audience-building using Twitter (Even the most advanced Twitter user might be surprised to learn these eight tips to take their tweeting to the next level.)
As with any content-dependent site, readers wanted to see fresh information and a range of expert opinions, so ServiceVirtualization.com’s team developed a rolling plan of topics to vary the articles. The content strategy included:
- News from the software development field
- Commentary on the news
- Summaries about studies of service virtualization
- Expert Q&As
- Customer testimonials
- Explanatory articles
- Book excerpts
- Webinars
- Surveys
Even humor was added to the mix with the publication of a weekly comic, Friday Funnies. (Humor can be engaging, as BustedTees and Charmin also proved.)
This comprehensive plan turned ServiceVirtualization.com into an industry hub. With more than 400 articles from nearly a dozen contributors – plus an aggressive social media campaign – the community grew to more than 1,800 registered members, more than exceeding its membership goals. The site also raced to No. 2 in native search, only behind the Wikipedia definition of the term, in less than eight months.
For other tips on working with contributed content and guest bloggers, head over to our post, “Remove the Guessing from Guest Blogging.”
