TMCnet Online Community News
ISI's Call Accounting Online Community: Creating a Learning Center with SEO and Content Power
ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert), a provider of Call Accounting, Auditing and Telecom Expense Management solutions, has been heavily active in the online marketing game for some time now. From his experience implementing powerful SEO and content initiatives, and building educational “learning” online community through TMCnet, Mark McNeill (VP Strategic Marketing Solutions), shares how ISI uses these and other online marketing initiatives to drive revenue for the business.
Moving Marketing (and Sales) Initiatives Online
Online Marketing is one of the most important initiatives at ISI, and has been an extremely successful investment for the company: Around 50% of corporate revenue is attributed to online lead generation initiatives, which is the largest producer of direct customer leads. Every marketers dream, right?
In fact, their efforts are so successful that their need for outbound prospecting has greatly declined; most leads are driven through their large channel partner network and online activities, causing the ISI sales team to do less prospecting and more nurturing and closing. Every sales person’s dream, right?
So, how’d they achieve this? A rich SEO and content program, coupled with an online community, are just some of the ways ISI uses online marketing to drive their sales. Other ways include a very active website, which ISI spent an extensive amount of time and effort making “SEO-Friendly” through various Pay-Per-Click and keyword-driving campaigns. But once social media entered the scene, it was a completely new online marketing game.
Social Networking as a Gateway (News 
- Alert) to Online Community-Building
In 2011, ISI started focusing some of their online marketing efforts on social media activities, and are currently active on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube (News - Alert) – posting articles every day or networking with partners and prospects. Social media allows ISI to find potential leads as they can post information on people’s sties and forge relationships with them. It also changed how ISI appears in organic search engine rankings: The more people that find and share their information on social sites, the higher their presence became in the results pages.
Online communities are a natural extension to social media and PPC activities, so ISI investigated the possibility of building a site with TMCnet after learning about the program in early 2011. With a strong history of working together on various other advertising and content marketing initiatives through TMCnet publications, ISI decided to build an online community to take their online marketing initiatives to the next level.
How to Build a “Learning” Community with Content
An online community was, according to McNeill, the “new way” to drive content marketing and SEO efforts, as he states “the way I looked at it was ‘content is king’ and cramming keywords doesn’t work anymore.” Why? Because search engines and your audience demand a high quality of content that’s easy to access, learn from, and share. This new demand for content meant that ISI needed to partner with a company like TMC (News - Alert) that could help them get a vast amount of quality content out to their broader industry more quickly than they had done before.
ISI chose to build the Call Accounting community to distribute all this content, and focused their site on education and learning because, as McNeill states, your audience “doesn’t want to be sold to all the time. They want [your company] to be an advisor or consultant; someone who shares information to help them learn about a topic of importance to them- so when they are ready to make a purchase they will come to you.” Here’s how they worked with TMC to develop their community:
1) Take existing ISI content (Case studies, press releases and announcements) and work them into new, original articles developed with their TMCnet editorial team
2) Look to integrate company branding and messaging into the community design
3) Work in social media for added SEO and link-sharing perks
4) Call readers back to the ISI company website so they can learn more about their products and services (hint: include a big lead capture form) but also send people to the community from the ISI corporate website as well.
These steps helped ISI achieve their community goals: Get content out to a broad audience, establish their company as a thought leader in the industry, and ultimately grab leads. Their learning community has been extremely successful, but took some effort. Here are some lessons learned from building the Call Accounting community:
Lessons Learned:
1) Be a Voice of the Industry
At first, ISI was hesitant to include content that included information about competing companies on their online community, until ultimately McNeill states that “part of having a learning community means people have learn what competitors are doing. It’s not a second website for ISI, it’s a community for everyone” so the more broad range of educational information on the site, the better value the site is for visitors. The benefit for ISI is that they sponsor that news, and are the “hosts,” allowing them instant credibility.
ISI applied this lesson to their social media interactions as well. By starting a LinkedIn group on Call Accounting, and posting discussions and articles between the site and their online community, they have seen a boost in activity, as hundreds of people have followed the discussion group who are all connected and focused on one topic.
Finally, ISI provides a link to their Call Accounting community straight from their company website, a best practice we’ve seen be extremely successful in content-sharing and SEO initiatives.
2) Figure Out What Content Works Best
ISI worked with their TMCnet team to determine which content would work best for the type of learning community they wanted to build, and ultimately worked to post as much content related to the customer as possible, like case studies and testimonials. By showing how a certain customer solved a problem, ISI was able to provide useful , educational content to their site visitors while also demonstrating the benefits of working with their solutions. Secondly, using a “learning center” approach to all content was key, and meant including information about competitors on their site as well.
3) Keep Content and Design Fresh
A vital lesson ISI learned was that you can’t have stagnant pages. If “people are coming to our site on a regular basis,” McNeill states, “and keep seeing the same old content, they won’t come back.” Ways to avoid this is to swap out ads, promote rotating webinars every 2 weeks, and refresh articles every week.
Note: Internal Management is Key
With so many initiatives going on, it’s critical to have clear management of “who does what” with various online activities. For ISI, they employ a dedicated marketing specialist who does nothing but social networking; posting tweets, getting followers, reaching out to social connections and monitor community and social pages to optimize and share content as much as possible. This resource also works with the TMCnet online community team to get the very latest information and news up on the Call Accounting community, and has clear line-of-site over all discussions happening in their Call Accounting spaces.
Measuring Success of Online Marketing Efforts
Developing an online community with TMCnet has been beneficial to ISI, as McNeill states “TMC has the audience we wanted to reach and ability to link to online ads and things we’ve published in online journals” And, the site receives an extremely high number of unique visitors, around 3,000 per month, which provides an SEO boost since TMC ranks so highly in organic search results and Google (News - Alert) News pages. And, TMC gives ISI the consistency they believe is key to successful content: By posting on various pages on a “one-off” basis, its’ sometimes difficult to gain any SEO benefits. But, with TMC their content is always streaming, consistently, in a high-traffic place.
In order to measure the success of their online marketing initiatives, McNeill looks closely at lead generation and where they are coming from, such as newsletters, their company website, email campaigns on their TMCnet online community. They have experienced an uptick in leads this summer, as well as areas their content and videos have appeared and been viewed. By “going viral” ISI sees their content marketing campaigns as a success.
Working with TMCnet
As far as the community goes, McNeill stats, “I highly recommend it. It’s the best investment we’ve ever made and the people at TMC are probably the most knowledgeable web, content, SEO advisors I’ve ever worked with. They do a great job are very responsive, know how to create content and copy and have advised us on numerous occasions on how to boost our SEO and take advantage of our community page.” ISI continues to raise in organic search engine results due to this partnership, and dominates Google News pages for their term: A large feat for a few months.
To implement any of the lessons learned from the ISI community on your own site, contact a member of your TMCnet team. To discuss your own best practices or experiences building an online community, join us Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter
About ISI
ISI Telemanagement Solutions, Inc. is a full-service telecom solutions company. They offer software and consulting services that help you manage your telecom costs, improve your productivity and increase your revenue. ISI's products are used by law firms, accounting firms, universities and other higher education facilities, hospitality properties, government agencies, medical facilities, as well as thousands of commercial companies. To learn more visit www.isi-info.com or their TMCnet online community.
About TMCnet Online Communities
TMCnet Online Communities are news-generated, content-rich portals that position your company as the leading “go-to resource” for your industry group. TMC has been building Online Communities for over 10 years, and continues to be the market leader at developing these successful sites for our customers. To learn more about the TMCnet Online Community program, please contact Anna Ritchie or call 203-852-6800 x 107. You can also visit us online.
Anna Ritchie is product manager for TMC's Online Community Program. Previously, she worked as a change and communications practitioner for a global consulting firm, and as a freelance marketing and communications specialist. She received her master's degree in English from Seton Hall University and her bachelor's degree in English from Loyola University.
