Inbound Marketing University

Tracey, after reading through your original question and the responses, it struck me that your clients may have a bigger communications and process problem that should be addressed.  If they do a poor job of writing/editing/proofing content for blog posts and related social marketing communciations, how are they doing on their sales proposals, customer communications, and prospecting materials?   The sum of these parts establish and sustain their reputation--all the more critical if they're a B2B company selling into a complex buying process that involves multiple touches. 

Years ago, before the dawn of the Web 2.0 era, I ran a corporate "business development" group that managed marketing services and lead generation for a large logistics outsourcing company.  When I landed in this role, our sales force handled their own communciations and business proposals, complete with all sorts of creative things that gave us the willies -- and didn't get the job done all that well for closing new business, either.  We brought in the top sales producers and worked collaboratively with them to develop new content and used an early content management tool to manage it; we extended the content revitalization work to all sorts of customer and market communications, established standards, and then trained the sales team and operations GMs how to use it.  And how to use our services to make them more successful.  This was an immense effort--it was highly technical content--it took six months to get the basics done--but it helped us execute a market development strategy that increased the average new deal value by 300% and a 50% growth in new business year over year without increasing headcount / costs.  It wasn't magic.....we'd engineered our content development processes to improve the return on the investment!    

My main point here is that content is content.  Although the writing style and even topics selected for social marketing may be quite distinct from business proposal writing and advertising and general customer communications, they should be framed in relation to each other for consistency and brand positioning.  Can you work with your cilents to take a step back, do a thorough audit of the all market-facing communications?  Search for root causes, identify improvement opportunities, and connect what happens in "marketing" to the overall business development process results.  When content connects to revenue, suddenly everyone sees green.

- Katherine