Today is a big day for us at Holland Applied. Today we publish our 200^th blog post. To commemorate all of the hard work over a dozen different employees have contributed, today’s post will take a look back at all the work we’ve done on this blog, what we want to continue to do with this blog, and our plans for the future.

When we started this blog way back in 2009, our goal was to use the blog to share some of the high purity processing knowledge we’d accumulated over the 50 years we’ve been in the industries. We also wanted to use the blog to solicit new ideas and get feedback on some of the issues in our industry.

As we started writing blogs, we found out it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded. Writing a blog is a serious time commitment and we found ourselves focusing on products, not the problems these products were created to solve.

This made posts dry and boring, and ultimately didn’t bear much benefit for our readers to reap. At one point, we were even subcontracting our blogs as part of a larger marketing program. Look closely at our posts and you should be able to pick out prettily easily which are written by industry experts and which are not.

So after floundering for a few years, and with renewed vigor and enthusiasm, we re-launched our blog about a year ago. This time around, our aim was quite different. Inspired by a few other well-known inbound marketing success stories, we re-launched our blog with the goal of addressing common problems our customers inquire about every day.

We didn’t want the blog to be about products. We wanted it to be about problems. By focusing on the problem and challenges encountered every day in the sanitary process world, we knew we could help people understand where our products fit and how best to use them.

Continually, as we began compiling posts, we quickly started to realize something- we offer a huge swath of products and each Holland employee has their own particular area of expertise. There is no “Sanitary Process 101” textbook.  And as we began adding new employees (and bringing current ones up to speed on industry trends), we quickly found out what a great internal resource our digital marketing efforts could be. And not only were the blogs helpful to our customers and staff who read them, but creating the content for the posts also help the authors develop and strengthen their own personal knowledge base.

The response we’ve gotten has been overwhelming. In just a few months, we’ve gone from 30-50 views of our blog per day, to over 250 each weekday. We set another record in June with over 5000 blog views and are on pace to go over 6000 views this month, in spite of the holiday and hectic vacation schedules. We get phone calls every day from customers who found us through our blog or website.  Our employees cannot go to a trade show or distributor school without another distributor or vendor saying they saw our blog and used it to help a customer in a specific application.

Going forward, we plan to double-down on this strategy. By helping customers understand the challenges of a rapidly evolving market, we can enable them to effectively solve their process problems. We think we’ll benefit from that by branding ourselves as thought leaders in our industry. Additionally, we plan on refining some of our blog posts and will soon start a monthly newsletter expounding on a few of these topics as well as addressing other industry news. So hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading the first 200 blogs posts as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them. Stay tuned from the exciting things to come.