If you’re looking to increase your company’s digital presence and generate more leads, one of your major focuses should be auditing your company’s blog. Does your blog do a good job of answering your buyers’ questions? Are you consistently blogging and optimizing your posts for SEO? Are your titles compelling enough to attract the reader’s attention?
I could list a dozen other questions to ask, but let’s specifically talk about how your blog should function as a triage for your lead generation efforts by creating momentum with visitors who are likely to buy.
Since one of the end goals of a business blog (or any customer-facing content asset) is to stimulate demand and generate inquiries, here are a few tips to increase conversions.
Plan Out Your Blog Content
Blogging can get overwhelming fast.
Creating a well-structured editorial calendar helps improve your blog’s efficiency and coherence and ensures accountability for fresh content generation.
Some organizations plan out an entire year, but you may work best on a quarterly (or even weekly!) basis. Either way, you need to look at the big picture and plan your content long-term. This allows you to capitalize on certain topics for seasons, events, or holidays.
Pardot Tip: Use Pardot’s Unified Marketing Calendar to add and organize your upcoming content. You can name the content, choose the date(s) and time, and select a background color for better organization. This tool is a great way to get your editorial calendar off the ground.
Offer Recommended Reading
Are you giving your visitors more reasons to stay on your blog? Offering readers another blog post or related resources (e.g., video, white paper, etc) gives them a reason to stay and click around your other content. Related post plugins like this can also help with SEO.
Pardot Tip: Use Pardot Custom Redirects in order to track how many clicks you receive on the additional resources on your blog. The stats will help you see which blog posts are most popular and where you need to add more content on your website.
Additional Resources:
How to Get More ROI from Marketing Automation
5 Digital Tactics for Customer Retention in 2015
How to Set Yourself Up for Success with Marketing Automation
Offer Downloads
Many marketers spend countless hours and dollars creating outstanding e-books and white papers only to use them sporadically in email campaigns. Apply a bit of creativity on your blog and showcase your solutions with an offer to download related content. Offering downloadable content on your blog increases your website’s secondary conversion points and is a great way to generate reconversions.
Pardot Tip: Use Pardot’s Dynamic Content Builder to build CTAs that change based on a prospect’s profile data or history of interactions with your company and website. Dynamic CTAs are much more personalized to the viewer, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Get Permission to Send Targeted Emails
Email remains critical to business marketing communications, and securing an opted-in email address is a primary goal for most businesses in the process of building a new business pipeline.
Dig a bit deeper (in your email preference center) and you can build targeted email lists based on specific site content.
Pardot Tip: Use a Pardot Form on your blog to allow readers to subscribe to upcoming content. From there, you can also have them update their preferences or self-select the type of information they want to receive—and how frequently they would like to receive it.
Finally, Don’t Give Up!
Most blogs fail in the first few months because companies start with the best of intentions, but then quickly realize it takes time, money, and resources. However, 23% of total Internet usage time is devoted to social networks or blogs, so a large chunk of users are obtaining information and knowledge via blogs—meaning blogging is too important to give up on.
What other demand generation techniques have you used on your blog? Let us know in the comments!
Adam – great post. The blog is often an overlooked place for generating new leads. One recommendation I have is to think about the blog as the first step in the buyer’s journey. They may read a blog post, then come back in a day or two to read another. Once they begin trusting your brand, you can introduce heavier content such as ebooks or white papers to start to capture leads (like you mention).
Keep up the great writing.
Adam-
Great point! Companies can then use Google analytics to track entrance paths and Marketing Automation for behavioral segmentation.
Hi Adam,
Thanks for sharing this awesome post on B2B Lead Generation. We will use all of the above techniques to improve our company’s sales.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Sachin!