WHEN I JOINED Accela my goal centered on a complete rebuild of the blog, both in terms of content produced and in design. This meant starting first with an overarching content strategy and editorial calendar to act as a road map for all content, coordinating a blog redesign, and establishing a blog structure with SEO best practices, proper calls to action and higher editorial standards.

BLOG SAMPLES:

• Research Shows Governments Could be Missing Out on Millions in Short-term Rental Fees - A look at how cities can benefit from Airbnb revenues with the right policies and modern SaaS/Software solutions

• The Accela 2019 Spring Release: The Best Gets Even Better - A sample of a product launch / update announcement.

• Agencies Advance Cybersecurity, Recruitment and Cost Savings with SaaS - Coverage of a joint Microsoft and Accela webinar.

• Digitize Your Government: 4 Benefits of Modern Planning and Building Tools - A blog that highlights Accela's planning and building SaaS solutions

1. IDENTIFY GOALS: The objectives for the blog were divided into two sets: the measurable performance indicators — such as unique user visits, page bounce rates, backlinks, and conversions — and softer yet equally significant, goals that included increases in thought leadership and sales collateral (i.e. success stories and white papers)

2. CREATE CONTENT STRATEGY AND EDITORIAL CALENDAR: Before planning specific blog topics, it was important to establish a content strategy that would tie everything together. We did this by carving out four overarching themes related to customer interests and Accela’s cloud applications. All specific blog topics that followed fell under each of the four themes.

These themes included the following:

a) Digital Service Delivery: the theme of digital service delivery focuses on a city or state’s ability to deliver effective digital services to citizens. It’s especially important to governments because a citizen’s impression of a city’s digital service is often the same impression they have of their city’s effectiveness as a whole. This topic covered a number of Accela solutions, with Accela’s application for Service Request Management, a mobile and desktop application handling 311 requests.

b) Emerging Regulations: State and local governments are constantly concerned about how they can best adapt to new policies and legislation. Regulatory shifts often create tight deadlines to provide new licensing, enforcement and administrative services and officials look to new technologies for scalable solutions. Accela’s cannabis licensing and short-term rental applications are prime examples of such technologies.

c) Next-gen economic development: A robust economy fuels a vibrant community and local governments are aggressively hunting new tools to enhance business growth and break down barriers for entrepreneurs. This theme pulled in the latest tech and strategies designed for civic economic growth and highlighted benefits of Accela’s business licensing, occupational licensing and building and planning applications.

d) Government Experience: From the back office to the front counter, the theme of government experience spotlights best practices and technologies to enhance government as a whole. Civic engagement, citizen communication, internal communication and modernization are just a few topics within the theme. Accela’s cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model also held a key place as a chief enabler in government experience.

3. PLAN BLOG SEO FORMAT: After deciding Accela’s themes and topics, search engine optimization served as a vital next step. We sought to increase our reach by instituting SEO best practices. Tactics like keyword research, header and sub-header tagging, alt-text for images, proper word count, internal links to related content and call to actions were all part of this effort. Collaborating with the Accela demand generation team and Accela’s data scientist guided this effort. Further, it would have been impossible without a complete web redesign of the Accela blog, as it moved from Joomla to a modern WordPress design.

4. CREATE WORKFLOW AND DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS: A stable workflow is the bedrock for a successful blog. Often even the best of blogs fail because an editorial or marketing team underestimates the time and resources to produce quality content. To avoid this, I coordinated with multiple Accela departments – marketing, product marketing, engineering and executives – to identify who would write for the blog, contribute insights to blog as subject matter experts and identified who would be a part of the editorial process: writing, editing, approval, design, web publication, and distribution to our newsletter, marketing email campaigns and social media channels.

5. WRITE, PUBLISH, PLAN: Once the blog was underway, I managed its editorial calendar, posting upcoming content a quarter ahead to keep everyone in sync and holding weekly content meetings to discuss potential new content, revisions to current plans and to review SEO performance.

THE BLOG'S IMPACT was a significant milestone. Not only did it help to double year-over-year traffic and generate sales leads, but blog traffic spiked in just three months with hundreds of unique viewers. The blog also created a vibrant new platform for company communication, enabled Accela executives to speak about industry issues, gave sales teams a regular supply of product use cases, and aided customers with education on Accela solutions.

THE KEY LEARNINGS from Accela’s blog relaunch and strategy is the focus on sustainability. In order to succeed, the blog demanded a clear and consistent supply of both time and resources. Support from Accela’s leadership and departments complemented this work. Clear communication and planning fostered this success as well. It was important to have an editorial calendar that was available online and allowed for advanced planning.