You Ask, I Answer: Using Company Names in Blog Content?

In today's episode, Matt asks, our agency wrote a blog post about six things to consider when choosing a yearbook publisher. Uh however, they used only our name are they used our name only once in the post. That seems odd to me. I asked why, and they said, We do not recommend putting your name in because it will then turn into it into an ad and not be really a blog and not will perform as one. What are your thoughts?

Uh this is really weird advice from an agency. The entire purpose of content marketing is to build brand awareness, right? Build awareness for your brand, what you're capable of, what you can do to solve somebody else's problems. And so there's a there's a line between a blatant ad and useful content. And if you read it out loud, if you read the content out loud, it becomes pretty apparent what that line is, right?

There's there's content out there that you could swear you could hear in the voice of like the cheesiest used car salesman like don't forget to buy from my company when you need services and so on and so forth. You can just hear that tonality in the language when people are writing. But fundamentally, the purpose of content marketing is to help somebody understand this is why you need this pro product or service. Not even necessarily obliquely sting o uh or uh obviously stating it, just saying if you have this problem, these are the ways to solve it. If you are trying to figure out how to contain costs and still deliver high quality product, these are the things to look for in this type of vendor, right?

And that's helpful content, that's useful content. And the way to work your company into that without being an obnoxious salesperson is to show examples, case studies, uh, just testimonials, uh, ways that demonstrate, again, without being in somebody's face, that you have credibility on the topic. You know, when our company worked with uh this uh school here, they were ha having cost overruns of 114% because they didn't account for the cost of the paper uh for it being a certain weight, but they didn't need to have that grade of paper throughout the entire thing. Uh the way we helped them handle it was to reduce the paper weight and finish on one section while preserving it in another section, uh, and so we brought the costs down to help them meet their objective. That would be a great example of how your expertise helped a school in this case, because you're a yearbook publisher, meet its objectives of getting this thing out, uh, and making people happy, uh, but also containing costs so that you know the school yearbook wasn't five hundred dollars and you know only the rich kids could afford one.

So case studies, testimonials, examples, uh asking people questions. Do you have this problem? Here's how we've helped people solve it. Do you have this problem? Here's how we've helped people solve that.

That's totally fine. Right? That's expected because part of part of content marketing is evaluating can this company help solve my problems? So for my company, uh Trust Insights. Here's a a common marketing analytics problem.

For example, uh, out of the box Google Analytics is poorly set up to deal with social media traffic. There's a built-in setting, but if you look inside uh your source medium list, very often you're gonna see stuff like you know, Facebook referral traffic, uh Twitter referral traffic, and you're like, that that's that's social media traffic, that's not referral traffic. Why is why is it coming in like this? Well, there's a configuration setting you can change in um in Google Analytics to fix that, to essentially rewrite those so that they're classified properly uh in your channel groupings. And so if I were writing a blog post on that topic, I'd say, hey, you looked in your Google Analytics and um seen this, uh there are ways to work around that.

And uh when my company, Trust Insights, did that for this client, they were suddenly able to correctly see the ROI or their social media because now all the social media traffic was correctly being bundled together uh to get that thing fixed. So you see, there's the use of the company name there, but it's not in the hey, you should buy it from us. It's here's how we've solved it for other people. We've changed some filters, we've changed some the the settings and channel groupings, that's how we fix that problem for other people. If that's a problem you have, then I would hope it would be obvious that reach out and say hi.

So I would do the exact same thing with your yearbook content to say, if you run into this problem, here's a way to solve it. And obviously your company as being a company that has subject matter expertise can answer that question. One of the things that uh uh my friend Tams and Webster says is that nothing builds credibility, like carefully and thoroughly stating the problem so that people understand that you understand their problems. You can go into such a level of detail uh and be so exacting in your description of the problem that people go, ah, you get it. You understand what the problem is.

You've seen this before, and you know how to fix it just by stating the problem artfully. So this agency's advice, it seems a little out of date and a little out of touch. Um, I would not go with it. I would look at the content and I would say, is it contextually appropriate to put your company's name in um in the section where you would naturally put it as a reference, right? Uh i in the in the case study, in the description.

Um absolutely certainly at the very end, after all the main content is done, when you put in that little uh biographical blurb, that is a hundred percent where you should be having a little bit of information that can be a little bit more sales you like, you know, at the end of the post. If you have trouble with maintaining cost overruns on your yearbooks, talk to our company. We're happy to help you. Um so yeah, that's odd advice. Um if you have follow-up questions on this, please leave them in the comments box below.

Happy to talk this one a little more a little bit through because again, it seems it seems odd. Uh and as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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