Blogging Evangelically

Of the many things a start-up needs to do, one oft-forgotten staple is to evangelize its worldview. Solar panel makers can’t sell you solar panels unless you know something about solar energy, global warming, or clean energy. So in effect, they have to make two sales: the first to evangelize their worldview; the second to sell you their product as having a competitive advantage.

We call that first kind of sale an evangelical sale, and it can be much more difficult for companies to master. It takes longer to pay off, its much less intuitive than just pitching features, advantages, and benefits, and it’s harder to do with authority than speaking of one’s own product. It would be fair to say that most innovative start-ups get caught selling to “believers” or “early adopters” and never “cross the chasm” successfully to court prospects who need more nurturing.

Fortunately, the cost of distributing evangelical sales and marketing material just took a nosedive! Blogging is the perfect medium for mastering the art of the evangelical pitch. Unlike conventional marketing collateral, you can produce content in blogs at virtually no cost. You can roll out a new pitch every day and see what flies. You can run topics through your blog and distribute them to different segments of your audience through social media and get real-time feedback.

Evangelizing a worldview requires authority and blogs were tailor made to have guest bloggers weigh in on certain issues where your employees just don’t have a credible voice. This is very much the case with selling software into regulatory requirements, as most start-ups won’t have full time legal or financial advisors on staff who can speak to the needs of customers beyond the technical need for features. Using “friends of the company” who are credible experts in this domain would be more difficult to do in a static piece of collateral, but very easy with an informal blog format. If you can’t nail them down as a guest blogger, even an interview or a few good quotes would be adequate.

Evangelism also requires some amount of faith that a trend will continue or that several trends will result in a future where products like yours are necessary. This requires passion that seems out of place in a data sheet or white paper, which are supposed to be written as factual, informative, and at least somewhat objective. Blogging is built for narrative and the quick and dirty litmus test for ideas and analogies. Writing about a key controversial narrative is a lot less risky in dynamic content that will be archived and off the front page in a matter of days; where “believers” can shout their approval and flag themselves for follow-up and non-believers will hardly notice it was ever there.

The dynamic, interactive and informal nature of blogging can allow you to achieve the long tail marketing goal of building a source of evangelic content without breaking your near term budget.