S2, E15: The Power of Group Blogging in Microsoft Dynamics with Anya Ciecierski of ERP Software Blogs

The Power of Group Blogging in Microsoft Dynamics, with Anya Ciecierski (S2 E15)
The Integrate Intelligently Podcast, Season 2, Episode 15 — with John Thomas and Chris Cannady (CADTALK), and Anya Ciecierski (ERP Software Blog)

John: Welcome to another episode of The Integrate Intelligently Podcast. I am not your host, Jeff Brickler. My name is John Thomas, and I'm the marketing manager here at CADTALK. If you've followed the podcast religiously you might have seen me before, but chances are you're meeting me for the first time.

I can guarantee you're meeting Chris Cannady for the first time on the podcast. He's our partner marketing manager. Chris, thanks for joining.

And I want to welcome our guest, Anya Ciecierski — I'm going to get her name right on the first try. Anya is the manager and creator of the ERP and CRM Software Blogs. Thanks so much for joining us.

Anya: Thank you very much. I'm excited to talk about marketing instead of all things E-BOM and M-BOM, which is what I usually hear from you.

John: We were saying before we turned the mics on that this is usually a pretty technical podcast, which we love — we work in a technical world. But it's nice to talk about blogs and marketing. This is what happens when you put three marketing people on a podcast instead of former engineers and manufacturers.

Chris: Three marketers walk into a podcast.

What the ERP and CRM Software Blogs Are
John: Today we're talking about the power of content marketing, blogging, and how that can transform your business in the ERP and ISV space. Anya, give us your elevator pitch — what do the ERP and CRM Software Blogs bring to the table? It's something you don't see a lot of in our industry.

Anya: The ERP Software Blog, the CRM Software Blog, and also one called the ERP Cloud Blog, which is outside the Microsoft Dynamics space, are group blog sites. About 160 Microsoft Dynamics partners — both reselling partners and add-on partners like CADTALK — participate by putting their content on our site, which has high domain authority and a lot of traffic. It helps companies like yours be seen by more people searching for those topics.

The analogy I use, which gets a little antiquated as we go forward, is a local newspaper versus a national one. Your website is the local paper — people expect to see your content, blog articles and videos there. My site is the national paper, where people who hadn't heard of you yet might find you, alongside a lot of others who are larger in the space. So there's a good place for both.

My whole philosophy when I built this was to help companies use the power of the group. We're not all working on an island. By contributing content and links to one central site, a high tide floats all boats. We're helping everyone be seen more, which helps the entire Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem and helps people searching get all the information in one place.

An Accidental Entrepreneur, 2009
John: Chris, I know you and Anya met at DynamicsCon. Anya, you've built a lot of relationships in that ecosystem. Take us back to 2009 — you mentioned you were still figuring out what a blog was. I'm sure blogging has changed not at all since then, and I hope listeners can detect the sarcasm. How did this come to be?

Anya: I think of myself as an accidental entrepreneur. I never realized where this would go.

Back in 2009 I went to a Microsoft event and they said, the new thing is blogging, you've got to have a blog. I'd been in the Microsoft channel since 1999, working at reselling partners doing marketing, and I was always looking for new ways to get us seen and found online.

So I went home and told my SEO consultant, Dave Foreman, who was helping with my website: Microsoft says we have to have a blog. I don't really know what that is, but that's the new cool thing. In our channel, blogging was very new. I saw a stat that my blog launched the same year the White House started one, so we have that in common.

What Dave told me was: a blog might be good for your ego, but it won't give you leads, because you're a small company. Who's going to write for it, who's going to read it, who's going to link to it? And then he said the sentence that changed the course of my career — if we had a lot of companies all contributing content to one blog, that could be a very powerful site.

I thought, I know a lot of people in this space. Maybe that's something we could try.

So I started it with a small-scale intention: helping the company I worked for, as director of marketing, get more visibility online. We started with ten pretty visionary partners. I just went to them and said, hey, there's this thing. Jennifer Harris from TMC was one of my first members, and she remembers her business partner saying, "there's this girl and she's got this thing."

Microsoft actually gave us some seed money, I think $2,000 at the time. We had relationships there, and their thinking was: you can do things on this site that we aren't allowed to do. So they helped us build some pricing tools and other things we could put on the ERP Software Blog.

It was an amazing business to start. Zero investment, and we were profitable right away. From those ten partners we expanded to about 160 participating now. During COVID I left my day job as director of marketing, and now I focus on this.

The Friendliest Channel
John: A couple of things come to mind. Compared to people in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, we're relatively new as CADTALK. Everyone I talk to has been in Microsoft since pre-2000 at least. Chris, do you feel that way too?

Chris: Absolutely. Everyone says 1985 or 1996 or 1999, and I'm saying 2025.

John: So there's a lot to learn, but also a lot of people who want to help people learn — like you, Anya.

Anya: That's a great testimony to how good this channel is. I've never been in another channel, so this is it for me. But a lot of people tell me this is one of the friendliest channels in the ERP and CRM space.

I did venture out a little into Acumatica, went to some of those events, and thought: I don't really know anybody here, let me go back to my comfort zone with all the Dynamics people.

I do think that's part of why our sites are helpful. It brings new people like you into this little country club environment where you get to be with everybody else.

John: That's a true testimony to the power of this community. We integrate with a number of different ERPs, so we interact across a lot of communities and it's enjoyable to get a feel for each. Having invested in the Microsoft Dynamics space, I really see why this makes sense.

Sixteen Years of Evolution
John: It's probably impossible to boil down 16 years of a blog's evolution, but what are the high points from 2009 to now?

Anya: We started with about ten members, and at the time they were just Microsoft Dynamics GP resellers. That was my world. As it took off, we added the other Microsoft Dynamics product lines, and then we made the decision to add ISVs and add-on partners like CADTALK.

At each change we wondered: is this going to be the end of it? Is this going to work? But we kept expanding — different features, different add-on directories, different tools people can use. Now, like everybody, we're starting to expand with AI. What can we do with AI on the site to help people?

The site has evolved a lot, but we're still pretty close to our original goal.

One challenge people always have, and still have even with AI, is coming up with good content. What do people want to know about me? That's one of the ways I can be helpful after doing this so long — helping people pull out what they should be writing about, and giving them the confidence that they have something to say.

Social media has been another huge shift from 2009 to now. We do a lot with LinkedIn. So we try to innovate and add new things, but the core value — let's all work together, contribute content, and get found — is the same.

Getting Experts to Write
John: What tends to be the biggest hurdle for someone coming to you asking whether this is worth it and how to do it?

Anya: I imagine at your company you have extremely intelligent engineers and software consultants with so much knowledge trapped up here. But getting them to write a blog post — getting any billable consultant to write a blog post — is extremely difficult. I'm not a writer. I don't know what to say. I don't have anything to write about.

Actually, those are the people who make the very best content. It's not the marketing people like Chris and me. It's the subject matter experts. So helping them figure out how to get the information from up here down onto the page has always been the challenge.

What I tell people all the time is: brainstorm the things people ask you constantly. In sales meetings, in customer support calls, even internally — what topics come up? Brainstorm who in your organization can answer them, and then have someone on the marketing team go to them with a phone recorder, or nowadays it's so much easier with Teams, and record them speaking stream of consciousness.

AI has made it easy to take that transcription and polish it into a blog post while keeping the person's personality, their word choices, the lingo of the industry. Those posts with good, meaty content do so much better than very polished marketing content. Sometimes that's hard to get people to understand — but once they see the difference and how the audience reacts, a light bulb goes off.

I was listening to your podcast with Scott and Jeff, and there were several things they said where I thought: that is an excellent blog post. They're just talking about their philosophy and what makes them different. That's exactly the type of content that should be turned into blogs and videos and put out on a site like mine.

Original Content That AI Helps With
John: Pulling back the curtain, it's affirming to hear you say that, because it's a huge part of why we do this podcast. Scott has so much knowledge from doing this, and he developed the product out of a pain point — exactly what you're describing.

One of my reservations about AI was AI-generated content, and being reticent about getting flagged for it. What changed my thinking — we were already doing this podcast — was at Community Summit last year. Sam Bush, now at Netstock, did a presentation on AI prompting for marketing, and I realized that what we create with this podcast is not AI-generated content. It's original content that AI can help with by synthesizing and pulling out ideas.

Every company has someone with something to say. It's just finding it and pulling it out.

Anya: Absolutely, 100 percent. When people tell me they have nothing to write about, it almost makes me laugh, because they have so much. They just need to figure out how to get it out.

Doing things like your podcast, where people are just expressing themselves — with the help of AI, every one of those podcasts could be turned into a summary. Embed the video and you've got, I don't know how many episodes you've done, but dozens that can be turned into blog articles.

It's not only about creating new content but reusing what you've already done. Have you put a ton of work into a pitch deck, an FAQ, training documentation? A lot of that can be pulled out as educational content.

Something else I used to do when I worked at a partner: I'd take the Microsoft licensing guide and pick it apart, find all the things I didn't understand, and then find someone in my company and ask what the difference is between this license and that one. If I'm not sure, my prospect isn't sure either. Distilling that into something a prospect can learn from gives you new areas to explore. The list goes on and on.

Authenticity in an AI Age
Chris: We've talked about AI, and also about the Microsoft space being welcoming and authentic. Could you speak to the hesitancy around AI and the loss of authenticity — and coach a company that's trying to figure out what content to create on why being genuine and transparent is not just important, but valuable and strategic?

Anya: There's a lot in that question. AI is changing so fast that all of us feel like we're on a roller coaster. It feels like just a few months ago my team and I were saying: don't use AI at all, don't use AI to write, it's evil.

Okay, that's not true. So we had to get with the program and say we're not going to be penalized for using AI, because everybody is going to use AI. It's like using a calculator. Is that cheating now? No. It's using a tool.

But how do we use AI to help us, rather than to do the job for us? The best way to use AI for content is to get the content first — a transcription, say — and then ask AI to help make it sound better and polish it. Or take conversations you've had with a prospect and ask AI for post title ideas. But the core has to come from your knowledge, with AI as the helper.

Though that's evolving too. The more we train our robots, the more we'll use them not just for proofreading but as an advisor. There's a company I've mentioned, Technology Management Concepts out in California, doing a lot to help people in our channel see AI differently. One of the things Roland Chi said to me at DynamicsCon was: don't see AI as an assistant, see it as a business advisor. If you train it by telling it everything about you, your business, your goals and your values, you can ask it to advise you in the spirit of Seth Godin, or Warren Buffett, or ask how you should build the strategic plan for content. That's much more than "fix my grammar in this post." And we're getting there fast — it's a little mind-boggling.

Then there's AI for keyword research, for social posts to promote your content. All of that used to take so much time.

So the problem of not being able to come up with enough content is mitigated by AI, but it's a bit dangerous. I'll transparently admit that I see content going onto my blog that is bad. I can tell it was written by AI. It doesn't make sense, it repeats itself. Maybe they said make it a thousand words, so it just repeats.

The other problem with using AI alone is that it can talk to your audience as if they're idiots. We want it simple, but we don't want to assume the audience is dumb. In your industry you don't need to explain why we need CAD in manufacturing. They know that. They know the tools, they know what manufacturing is. What you want is the deeper knowledge specific to you. AI will start super simple just to fill the page, and that's a challenge.

I went around a bit, but hopefully that answered the question.

John: We turn these episodes around pretty quickly, and I feel like by the time we post this, what we're saying might be outdated. It's moving that fast, and the best practices are evolving so quickly it almost feels like there aren't best practices.

Trust as a Ranking Signal
Anya: One thing Chris mentioned that I didn't touch on was trust.

When all these changes started happening with Google and the new algorithms, we thought the group blogs wouldn't be as valuable anymore. What we're finding is that they're more valuable, because of trust.

With AI it's so easy not to know whether you're talking to a person or a robot. Is this podcast real? We could be three robots right now, and you could create that in a few minutes. It's scary. So when people have authenticity in their content, it signals that these are people I can trust.

Google is also looking for content it can trust, because it has the same problem of not knowing who's real. So we're doing things on our sites like adding author schema in the background and author bios, so Google sees a real person with real expertise wrote this. That's important to humans and to search engines. And our site fills that need because it's been around since 2009 — there are about 12,000 articles on the ERP Software Blog alone, which signals domain authority and foundation.

Something else Chris and I were talking about earlier: when we started, we had one Microsoft Dynamics partner per state, because geography was crucial. I have my clients in Connecticut and nobody else should sell here. Then cloud changed that — I work everywhere, with everyone, and people stopped caring about state designations.

But now it's coming back. Several resellers have told me it matters again, because a prospect wants to know they're local. If they needed to, they could drive to my office and see that I'm a real person with a real team. Maybe they never will, but they know they could, and that I'm not a robot sitting in a funky garage somewhere. That trust element is becoming more important again.

John: That's an important insight about locality, and I appreciate the local versus national newspaper analogy — my very first job was at a local newspaper.

What About ROI?
John: That leans into the business value of group blogging. We've talked about trust, but I can almost hear a CEO in the background asking about ROI. How have you seen that benefit your members?

Anya: The goal is to drive traffic to your article on our site, have the person think this person knows what they're talking about, click through to your website, and turn into a lead.

I always tell people that if I could sell ERP leads, I'd be a billionaire. But I don't. What I sell is the pathway — the traffic for people to find you and come back to your site.

I've had members tell me they can track a click from our site to theirs that turned into a deal. StockIQ told me a prospect saw them listed in the directory on the ERP Software Blog, knew what they did, called them, and it became a deal.

Marketing is an art and a science, as my friend Tanya likes to say. You can track the ROI and the clicks from our site back to yours, which you can equate to what you'd pay for pay-per-click. But there are also non-quantifiable benefits — people saw us all over the place. It wasn't one thing. Whenever they were researching integrating manufacturing software to ERP, they saw you here and here and here, and they start thinking that's the company I should reach out to, even if it isn't that same day.

A company told me recently they'd closed a deal from our site, and when I asked how the prospect found them, they said they'd read their blog article. When I did a little research, they hadn't posted an article on my site since 2022. So that prospect found a very old piece of content and it still made them take action.

That's one of the things I love about blogging — it's like compound interest. You can do a trade show and spend a gajillion dollars, or a wonderful email campaign, or a lumpy mailing, and then it's gone. When you invest in good content and spread it around, it works for you silently in the background, so people find it when they're ready, not just when you're ready and in front of them at a trade show.

And there's another element of promotion now. A company spends a lot to be at a trade show, and if they're a member of my site, I'm doing all kinds of promotion for them on LinkedIn and on the blog. So for the small cost of my site, which is $175 a month, you're getting — dare I say — influencer exposure from someone in the channel saying, maybe you haven't heard about these folks, but you should. Is that worth a little add-on to your trade show investment? I'd argue yes.

So there's hard ROI you can measure, and then the part that's harder to measure, which is the bane of our existence as marketers.

John: It truly is. It's funny you mention a blog from four or five years ago being how someone found a deal. I did an internal presentation a few months ago on the marketing funnel and the B2B buyer journey, and how people try to chart it as linear when it's so far from that — the number of people involved, the number of touch points.

I feel like people try to explain marketing versus branding, creating these separate categories for how you promote your business. To your art and science comparison, it's all lumped together. It's very hard to parse those out, and almost detrimental to try.

Anya: I completely agree. I was talking to Andrew King a few years back, when he'd just won Business Central Partner of the Year, and he said their goal is to become ubiquitous. Whenever anyone thinks about BC, I want them to think about our videos, our posts, our shows. It's all one giant cloud of content pointing back to them.

I love having a business owner who sees that vision and says: it isn't one campaign that brings in all the leads, it's a flywheel you have to keep pushing. That's hard for business owners to see, when the question is how much did I spend and how many leads did I get today.

When I was director of marketing at a small VAR, I was lucky to have an owner who said, do what you want to do. It took us a while to get going. I started with content marketing earlier than a lot of people, and we were a very small reseller — yet people thought we were huge, because we were putting out so much content and getting so seen and winning awards. It was really cool when people figured out, oh, you're just this little partner, I didn't realize. We could be more nimble, and we focused on inbound and getting as much content out there as we could so prospects came to us. That hasn't changed.

VARs, ISVs, and How They Work Together
Chris: I want to get into this part of the ecosystem, because it's an interesting dynamic — the relationship between a VAR, an ISV, and the ERP provider. We sat in on a session about this at Directions together, which partially sparked the question. How do you see content and marketing working for a VAR versus an ISV? Where does it overlap and where does it differ?

Anya: Excellent question. At Microsoft and industry events we always have these sessions about how VARs and ISVs can get along and help each other. And it's typically the ISVs, the add-on providers, asking the question, because they want to help and be friends. And the VARs are sometimes saying, we have enough friends, we don't need more friends.

In terms of blogging — and this is the hill I'll die on — having content out there for people to find when they're ready, rather than when you're ready, is helpful from a partner-to-partner perspective too. If you've put a lot of content out as an ISV, those partners are reading it. They're looking at it thinking, maybe this is somebody I should check out. That goes much further than seeing a booth once at a trade show.

ISVs can also get a warm entry into meeting VARs by commenting on their content. Say: you wrote an excellent article about this manufacturing case study, I loved the way you explained it. No sales — just, I appreciated that content and I'm going to share it with my audience. Then when you see that partner at a show, or on a cold call, it's easier for them to say, I remember these folks, they did that for us.

As my friend Kate Coffey-Bacon says: give, don't grab. How much can you give that people will remember, so they think, maybe that's the ISV I want to work with?

Our directories on the ERP Software Blog matter here too. Prospects look at them, but partners look at them as well. If you're an ISV trying to get more partners to know you, being listed where they see other people listed is helpful.

Joint case studies are a great idea. Sadly it usually has to be the ISV that does most of the work, but saying "we had a great project together, can we take on the burden and expense of writing a case study and promote each other through it" goes a lot further than a phone call asking whether they need your tool.

And make it as easy as possible for a partner to know how to spot a prospect for you — which again comes down to content. Are you publishing the questions someone in this position has, and the pain points? That educates the partners you're trying to work with about what a fit looks like.

John: Anya, you're getting my gears turning as a marketer. That's extremely helpful.

Staying Neutral
John: With all these partners on the same blog, do you run into challenges balancing those relationships, or not playing favorites — or choosing to play favorites? That's a position we find ourselves in too, since we work with a number of VARs and ERP providers.

Anya: I try to be Switzerland. I try to be neutral. Everybody can put content on my site and we promote everyone.

As the ERP Software Blog, it's easier to be neutral. As me, Anya Ciecierski, do I sometimes fall into the trap of saying, go talk to them? Absolutely. And a lot of that comes down to relationships. Do I know the person at this AP automation firm? Do I know they're great to work with? Yes. So that's how I'd make a recommendation — who's easy to work with, who do I have a relationship with from events.

There's an element of who I think is putting out good content. But do I know which AP automation tool is actually functionally better? No. That isn't my world. All I can do is say I know these are good people and you should talk to them.

On the blog itself there's very little tiering. Everybody is pretty equal.

John: I appreciate the Switzerland approach. That can be a hard nation to embody.

Where Content Marketing Goes Next
John: We touched on the evolution of AI earlier and I wanted to return to it. Looking ahead, how do you see content marketing evolving?

Anya: I think we'll get better at writing in a way that attracts the AI tools to mention us, the way we did for search engines. Answer engines. I heard Brandy at Big Room Creative talking about search engine optimization versus answer engine optimization, and I found that interesting, because all of us as marketers are going to learn what the AI tools want — so that when someone types in "what's the best manufacturing integration software for Microsoft Dynamics," you hope they mention you. We aren't there yet.

Also at DynamicsCon, one thing that came up was: will we even have websites in five years the way we have them now? That got me thinking that maybe it becomes more of a billboard you go to, and then you start talking with an AI agent that answers all your questions about the product — tell me about pricing, tell me why I should use it. Training an agent to do that is a huge endeavor, but it could be where we're going.

On the other hand, my gut says people will rebel against all of this a little and say, I want to talk to a person. A lot of people think that's going away. Maybe it's the generation I'm in, but I think human interaction is still going to be important, and maybe more important — because we're going to distrust everything, and the only thing I can trust is looking you in the eye and seeing that you know what you're talking about.

I'm no AI expert. At Microsoft events I feel like a newbie with AI, and then I go to my local book club and they don't even know what ChatGPT is, and I think, let me tell you, I'm so smart, I know all about AI. So it's comparative.

Chris: From my perspective, I don't think it's a generational thing. I feel similarly that personal contact at a company is becoming more valuable.

Think about the shift in social media marketing from coming out of a company's profile to being disseminated by influencers, or by individuals who work at that company. There are people in the Microsoft space who do this really well, who've built personal brands that make their company's offerings seem more appealing, because people see that individual as trustworthy.

Over a long time the shift has gone away from the company posting on its LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok, toward empowering employees or working with influencers to be champions of the brand and the product.

Buyers want to hear about both good and negative experiences. They want to hear from champions of a brand — why do you love this brand? And maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's something AI won't replicate. People champion things, and AI is too good at aggregating knowledge to champion one thing.

Anya: I agree. I know putting on a podcast like yours is a ton of work, but the benefit is that even if someone evaluating your company doesn't listen to every episode, they can see that you've consistently put out content showing your expertise. That goes a long way toward the feeling that these people will look out for me, they know what they're talking about, that's somebody I want to work with.

Content marketing is a lot of work. It would be much easier if we could send a gajillion emails, or go to a trade show and get all the leads. But I've seen the evidence, and I believe it's worth the time because of the long-term effects.

Takeaways
John: As we wrap up — if you had to give someone one nugget from this discussion on blogging and content marketing in the ISV and VAR space, what would it be?

Anya: Think about how you can turn conversations into content.

Don't just write about obscure or overly technical ideas. Think about what your prospects and customers are actually asking, and what they're searching for. You get that from the conversations you have with them.

Get into the mindset where every time you're talking to somebody you're thinking: how could I turn that into content? My old boss used to laugh at me, because he'd be talking and I'd say, that's a blog post — and shove my phone up into his face. People don't realize what's coming out of them, but it's gold.

So marketers should think more about that, as opposed to doing keyword research, picking the highest-volume keywords, and writing five posts about them, or outsourcing to somebody who doesn't know what's going on. Really think about how to take everyday conversations with customers, prospects and your team and turn them into content people want to read — content that sounds like you and is authentic.

John: You've given me my LinkedIn clip. Thank you.

Chris: My personal takeaway goes back to the adage: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. We see that at different levels. I experienced it at DynamicsCon — the aggregate effect of a lot of people trying to go further together, like at the partner marketing event where you and I met. We see it at a more micro level with something like the ERP Software Blog, a lot of people aggregating knowledge to provide a service to customers.

And if a marketing team wants to create that flywheel effect, it has to be a team effort across the entire organization — aggregating the organization's knowledge and its people to provide real benefit to the customer and gain that trust.

Anya: And you and I met because of LinkedIn, Chris. So we shouldn't discount building relationships that way. I saw a post about you packing your camera equipment and getting ready, and that's what made me recognize you at the table at the partner marketing event.

Chris: I wanted to mention that earlier, when you were talking about commenting on people's posts. It's easy to underestimate. For us as marketers it makes sense, but it's something marketing teams should communicate to their organizations: be present on your customers' and partners' pages, provide value, provide kudos, cheer people on. Then when you make a relationship withdrawal — hey, can you help me with this — someone is far more likely to.

Anya: Absolutely. LinkedIn could be a whole other podcast. LinkedIn video, there's so much to cover.

Where to Find the Blogs
John: Anya, thank you so much for joining us. Where can folks find your blogs, and how does becoming a member work?

Anya: erpsoftwareblog.com, crmsoftwareblog.com, and erpcloudblog.com are where you'd go to read educational content from people like you, Chris and John, who publish to help people in the buying process — for ERP and CRM tools, or the add-on functionality that goes on top of them.

If somebody wants to be a member of those sites, put their content out there, and be listed in all my directories, we have a site called groupbloggers.com with information about that. Or find me on LinkedIn, if you can spell my last name.

John: Anya, thank you again for joining us, and for all your contributions to this community. Your work is highly valued.

Anya: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on such a techie podcast.

John: We'll resume your regularly scheduled programming about bills of materials and manufacturing next time. Thank you all for listening to this marketing edition of The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — we'll get Jeff and Scott back on here next time.