Another marketing blog success story

Fredrik Wacka, a contributing writer at webpronews.com, wrote a nice piece on the marketing blog success of a security company and what the company has come to expect of its blog efforts. And you gotta love the name of this down to earth blog, Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless.

Greg Hoffman, of The Security Awareness Company, told Wacka “The company has been around for 15 years but blogging has helped brand our company as the premier Security Awareness team in the industry; all while saving us time and money.”

Here’s some highlight’s from Wacka’s interview of Hoffman. Lawyers and legal marketing professionals ought to be able to apply some of what has worked for Hoffman in their own law firm marketing efforts and achieve some the same results – increased exposure, increase Web site traffic and increased sales.

What does the company expect/hope that their blog will deliver in terms of marketing and branding?

• During the planning of a marketing strategy for his security awareness company’s new products last spring, they began studying the world of blogs. They had a limited advertising budget so needed to find a way to connect with the world while using the same style Winn Schwartau, head of the company, a colorful character and a legendary author/writer in the Information Security Industry.
• They quickly created an online community of “security aware” readers. Winn contributes regularly by sharing stories, anecdotes and “relevant rants” about computer, people or physical security threats. They also post trade magazine articles and columns to help give our readers the knowledge they need to combat these threats.

How have clients or prospects reacted?

• Winn receives substantial feedback from meeting people at the tradeshows. They can’t walk ten feet down the aisle of a show without someone stopping to chat with him, but this time, they were talking about the present, mostly, not the past. They were excited about the messages delivered and the general “tone” of the blog.
• Winn’s phrase, “Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless” was almost scrubbed internally. Not many of the staff liked it for external use. But I knew that Corporate America would understand and forgive us. The title gave us the edge to be heard amongst the increasing crowd of blogs.

What are the concrete results seen from their blog?

• Increase in traffic to Web site and blog. Plus the site and blog feed off of each other.
• Active sales leads increase on high traffic days but they also range higher on a daily basis compared to this time last year.
• The “Open” and “Click” rates of their newsletters are also above average as the audience is passionate about the topic and they are always happy to read and download free materials.
• Because of the power of blog ranking in search engines, they have seen a surge in requests from subcontractors and Corporate Partners asking to join them in their quest to train the masses about computer security.

Bottom line Hoffman told Wacka: “I don’t see any change in our Corporate Blog strategy in the near future. The demand is extremely high for the content we provide and computer security threats will only get worse as technology evolves.”