Why do you write blogs? Does your business have an objective in mind?
Often, a business designs its blog to attract leads for the sales team. Unluckily, many blogs can lack what they require for the right lead generation. Here, we will discuss the different ways to optimize your blog for lead generation. With this guide, you will be able to create a lead generation tool for your business. Use them today to see what difference they will bring to your business.
Blogs are an effective, popular, and one of the easiest ways to attract people towards your digital domain. This is good news. What is the bad news? Traffic generation is just half of the thing. Likes, page views, comments, and tweets are great, but none of them is the ultimate objective. You must convert that traffic to leads. As per the Forrester Research, nearly 97 to 98% of your audience leaves your website without taking any action or identifying themselves.
They may like your posts and may come back again and again. They may consider you as an authority and a specialist in your industry. But most of the people visit, read, and then leave. You must do something extra to take it to the next level. Can you afford to allow 98% of your potential leads to leaving your website without a hint?
Traffic generation merged with lead generation makes your blog a worthwhile investment. Other things including likes, comments, retweets are nothing but just metrics. People like your posts and that gives you encouragement, but that will not help you to earn any money. You must actively generate both leads and traffic. Traffic without leads is meaningless. Leads without traffic will ultimately dry up.
Here is the best news: a frequently updated blog with valuable and high-quality content is one of the best lead generation tools when done correctly. Here are a few reasons why you too should use a blog for lead generation.
Visit Digital Marketing Courses and learn about blogging and how it can help in growing your business.
Why is blogging important?
For a business, blogging does more than allow followers to know about the latest company news and events. When done correctly, it can determine you as an authority in your sector, give others an inside look at your workplace culture, and enhance your SEO.
By creating posts that educate your audience about your products and services and the industry it is in, you consider yourself as a go-to-resource in your customer’s time of requirement. Not only this, the more useful pages you publish, the more search engines like Google look at your site. As a result, you will attract more visitors through search.
In fact, companies that have embraced blogging receive 97% more links to their website. And, as all of us know, inbound links are one of the most significant factors Google considers while ranking your site.
But what happens when visitors reach there?
You want to attract them, grab their attention, call them to action, and turn them into consumers.
But, before you can exploit their customer lifetime value, you must capture their personal info, through a procedure known as “lead generation.”
Table of Contents
1. Always write the content of value- for human beings first
The first important thingis to direct all your blog content toward benefitting your human audiences. SEO must always be secondary. Your content must help people resolve a problem or learn something new. It must address one of their difficult points and give them the training they need to move forward.
Instead, when you focus on SEO initially, you take various unnecessary hazards. You risk getting penalized by Google. You risk isolating your audiences. You risk lessening your conversion rate. Instead of trying to force a high rank, you must focus on creating high-quality content, and your best ranking will come effortlessly.
2. Use Call to Action’s in the text of your blog posts
A Call-to-action is just a way to force your reader to act. They are important for post-click landing pages as well as in ads. Often, they are underused in blogs. If you are writing a post on how to generate leads, include a link in the text of your post to a pertinent whitepaper or ebook.
3. Try the “Hello Bar”
One of the significant ways to optimize your blog for lead generation is to use the “Hello Bar.” When somebody arrives on your blog, they are the top of the page. However, there is no guarantee that they are going to scroll down. In such a situation, putting your CTA at the top will be helpful.
The Hello Bar is a simple yet effective tool that places your Call-to-Action in a thin, attention-grabbing band across the top of the page. Instantly identifiable, static, and stays there even if they scroll down.
Using a “Hello Bar”, DIY themes created under 1200 new subscribers in just 30 days. While the Hello Bar is perhaps the industry standard, there are choices available that do a similar thing:
- Sumo SmartBar
- SalesPanda
- Sleeknote
- WP Notification Bar
- OptinMonster
You can even find various free WordPress plugins, but make sure that you get what you are paid for. A Hello Bar can be used to promote social engagement or email subscriptions, advertise new products and services, and much more.
4. Retargeting
Even after your hard work, there will be a small chunk of traffic that may leave your website even without completing your CTA. Maybe they were not having enough time, or they did not find your offer interesting, or maybe they just missed it.
This is where retargeting comes in. You can use services like Perfect Audience, Re Targeter, AdRoll, or PixelMe.
Essentially, a small string of code known as the pixel is placed on your site. This pixel gives a tracking cookie on the browser of each visitor to your blog. Then, it follows them across the internet.
It may sound creepy, but it is not.
Have you ever come across an ad of a product that you were searching for on Site 1 in the sidebar of Site 2, or while browsing your Facebook feed? That is what retargeting is.
The pixel follows them and shows relevant ads to them to grab their attention back to your blog or a landing page. You get another chance to convert them.
For instance, Wordstream experienced about 300% rise in engagement and about 51% more leads after several months of retargeting. If you are ready to put your money, effort, or time into retargeting, you will see a rise in conversions.
5. Provide exclusive content
Have you ever thought, why should someone read your blogs and not others? There are so many blogs available in every industry. In an oversaturated blogging market, if you want to generate leads from your blog, then make sure your posts differ from your competitors. Several studies reported that 55% of readers spend just 15 seconds reading an article. However, if you provide exclusive content, it will offer them a reason to spend more time in reading, which increases the chances of converting them.
6. Offer your readers exclusive content
Just because you are offering people free ways to enhance their business does not mean that you cannot hold a little something back for those who are interested to provide a little extra in exchange for more info. Give exclusive content for the readers to read that can assist them more than free access to your blog can.The key to do this right is offering value in your regular blogs but going further in-depth with your special content.
7. Try to include a welcome redirect
This is one of the important ways to optimize your blog for lead generation. If you have simply created a piece of content that you feel will be important for your readers, consider using something like a “welcome redirect.” WordPress provides a plugin that will permit you to direct your website visitors to a lead capture page before they even come to your blog. Always keep in mind, this is a more “in your face” approach as opposed to the other passive ones we have discussed so far. As such, it can be irritating to your audience. Make sure you use the A/B test as it helps to increase your conversion rate rather than affecting it negatively.
Ensure you have an adequate system for the collection of contact and follow up
The objectives of your blog lead generation depend on your capability to collect, manage, and follow through with the contact submission of readers
It can begin as simple as attracting subscribers, but your most qualified leads will be coming from the landing page forms. Either way, you require one central place for all the accumulated information.
You can begin with just using a tool like MailChimp to coordinate and contact subscribers, but your landing page needs a more in-depth tool
Using a tool like the free CRM tool from HubSpot can help you to organize and follow up with the contacts you attain, but its constraints might assure you to invest in an advanced tool, like Salesforce.
The most significant tool you require is one that can correctly catalog your contacts and examine all their interactions with your business. This will assist you to better understand them and follow up in a personalized and effective manner.
8. Develop a strategy that focuses on one objective: qualified leads
While it is great to see people coming in to read your content or even sharing it with others on their network, your focus should always be on attracting “qualified” leads. Qualified leads are the ones that matter most for the sales. They are interested in making a purchase. Having a blog strategy that revolves in and around lead generation will assist you to create targeted content that attracts results. While creating a content strategy, always keep in mind this objective. For every section of your strategy, ranging from content planning to creating content, and promoting, and beyond, keep in mind the reason behind blogging. This will help you to stay on point with your attempts for maximum lead generation results.
9. Promote your content at the right time in the right place
It is correct that you have a blog section that follows best lead generation practices, but has ever thought whether you are promoting them effectively or not? To convert your leads, it is important to promote your content where your audience is present most of their time and when they pay their attention to it. This can be anything in the form of social media, an email or through any other means. The objective is to attract the right audience towards your new resource or article.
Social media content promotion is just about being on the right platform at the right point of time. If you cannot find your target audience on LinkedIn, no need to waste the resources there. If they log in to Facebook only during the evenings, ensure that you are scheduling all your promotions for that specific time. You must not forget to research about your social media audience before. There are thousands of ways to promote blog content. It is all about finding the tricks that work best for you- methods that your audience will note.
- Blog summary downloads
At our Instapage, we like to pack our blogs full of content. We like to include examples, case studies, and images that prove all the points that we discuss all the way through. But, at times that is too much to digest for some of the readers. Everyone does not have enough time to make their way through a long blog post of over 2000 words. To address this issue, what you can do is offer short, downloadable summaries for those who want to know what the blog is all about without reading the whole content.
Conclusion
When done in the correct way, content marketing can be one of the most effective marketing channels you can use. It can bring a constant flow of traffic to your blog and site. But just as your marketing website converts visitors to customers, your blog needs to convert the readers to subscribers. You must get some information from them while you offer so much actionable and free content.