Leads are the lifeblood of your business.
Without leads, you have no one to guide down your marketing funnel and convert into a paying customer.
When leveraged correctly, your business’s blog is an excellent venue through which to provide visitors with conversion opportunities.
If your business is struggling to generate leads, you’re optimizing your blog is a great first step. Below, we share six tips you can use to turn your blog into a lead generation machine.
Related Article: Why the Company Blog is More Important Than You Think
1. Integrate Your Blog With Your Website
When you’re using a blog to generate inbound traffic, many visitors see your blog before they ever access your website. Thus, you have to design your blog well enough to make visitors want to check out your other digital assets.
The key is to make your blog match your business’s website as much as possible. This means designing it to have the same style and navigation, and hosting it on the same domain as your site. A bonus of hosting on the same domain is that any SEO efforts on your blog will also boost your website, and vice-versa.
2. Close the Gates
If they’re planned and executed well enough, your blog posts will be offering a lot of value to your audience for free. If you don’t give them a little bit of incentive, it’s going to be hard to push them into your marketing funnel and convert them.
Use a call-to-action (CTA) within your blog post that links a visitor to a gated content offer hosted on a landing page. A piece of content providing deeper-level information, such as an in-depth guide, eBook, or a recorded webinar should do the trick.
Gate your content behind a submission form asking for the visitor’s name and email address so that you can kindly provide your visitors this valuable information for free. They’ll get a valuable business tool and you’ll have your lead.
3. Make Every Word Count
With the internet putting information at consumers’ fingertips and with multi-tasking becoming more common than ever, the average American attention span is now lower than that of a goldfish. This means that when it comes to blog post creation, you need to eliminate fluff and make every word count to hold your reader’s attention.
Increase the likelihood of you visitor converting by finishing your blog post with a relevant CTA or links to your other posts on similar topics.
4. Hold Occasional Webinars
Use your blog to discover the content that your audience is most interested in, and repurpose that topic into a conversion-driving event. When you find a topic that your audience is especially interested in, holding a webinar is a great way to generate leads. Simply collect visitor contact information in exchange for a reserved spot. Webinars can be used to go over a particular topic your audience has a problem with, demonstrate a new product or service, or just to start a discussion.
A huge benefit of a hosting a webinar is the feedback. Beforehand, you should ask your audience what topics they’d like to see discussed. During and after the webinar you should also invite as many questions as possible. These questions give you a feel for what your audience really cares about, and should give you plenty of ideas for content to blog about in the future.
Best of all, webinars are easy to repurpose as additional content you can post through your blog. You can simply record a webinar and write a post about the event and topics covered. Or if you want to keep collecting leads, you can offer the video to your blog visitors willing to give you their contact information.
5. Leverage LinkedIn
Most marketers know they need to spread their posts on Facebook and Twitter, but a lot of people overlook LinkedIn as a viable channel through which to post links to your blog content. Business Insider states that LinkedIn generates 277 percent more leads than either Facebook or Twitter does. Despite that, only 47 percent of B2B marketers actually used LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides a better opportunity to drive leads to your blog, and there’s a lot less competition.
Related Article: Why Every Business Should be Blogging
6. Never Stop Testing
It seems simple enough, but many bloggers simply don’t run enough tests to see what posts and topics invite the most audience engagement and conversion. They’ll take a look at the numbers their content is producing, but they don’t know how to take advantage of their data and use it to drive results. We recommend A/B testing elements of your blog, including image type, headlines, and types of posts published to optimize those features for lead generation and conversion.
With these tips, you’ll soon turn your business blog into a lead-generating machine. Do you have any lead generation tips you’ve discovered from your own blog publishing efforts? Make sure to let us know with a comment.
