Business blogs need more than just compelling posts and informative content. To bring serious value and conversions, blogs also need to generate plenty of relevant leads.
To accomplish this elusive task, we’ve compiled a bundle of tested tactics and offerings to help you lure in lots of beneficial leads. Start employing a few of these ideas and make your business blog the star of your marketing efforts.
1. Clearly define your audience and services. Within moments of landing on your company’s blog, readers should have a clear sense of exactly what your niche is, and the offerings you showcase. If what you provide is not immediately apparent, you’re likely to lose folks from word one. Likewise, there should be a clear sense of the audience you serve. If you’re talking specifically to restaurant owners and managers, as an example, there should be plenty of clues in headings, taglines, post titles, calls to action, and other content that makes this obvious.
2. Smart calls to action. Even if you write the most compelling blog posts on the planet, they aren’t very valuable unless they’re enticing folks to take action. Many calls to action will revolve around newsletter signups and site registrations. Here’s a great example from the MailChimp.com blog:
Additionally, you may offer different whitepapers and reports that require a download, like this example from Compendium Blogware:
You can also invite visitors to learn more about the services you offer, like this simple but compelling call to action:
Regardless of what you are specifically enticing users to try, your calls need to be very descriptive and clear. This example from Basecamp is perfect; it leaves nothing for the user to extrapolate:
3. Be an authoritative voice in your niche. You should be anything but timid about the areas you cover in your blog, and readers ought to feel your expertise and knowledge ooze from every word. Your business blog is your company’s best opportunity to showcase legitimate expertise. Don’t miss the boat with passive or flaccid language!
4. Offer free goodies and giveaways. It’s an old and tested trick: Give away stuff, and people will flock to get their chance. The key here is to offer items that truly feel valuable, and have relevance to your business. Giving away free tires on a blog that covers landscaping advice is obviously a disconnected attempt. But whenever possible, reward your readers for their loyalty.
5. Publish case studies. Journalists and fellow bloggers are often looking for case studies to pull relevant facts and examples. Well-written and researched case studies can be traffic boons, as well as boosts your industry credibility. They also have significantly more staying power than the average post, and do well for SEO too.
6. More landing pages means more results. Anum Hussain from Hubspot Research recently published a study proving that a higher number of landing pages produces better results for business blogs. “Companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15,” he writes. This stat is critical as you’re planning your strategies; when appropriate, don’t forget about creating specific landing pages for your campaigns.
7. Measure your results. No matter what tactics you choose to employ, it’s imperative that you test your successes at every turn. Take the time to thoughtfully analyze your metrics, and have clearly outlined benchmarks that help you measure the level of success for your posts, calls to action, and other attempted strategies. Examples of metrics you should be watching are overall impressions, click-throughs (and subsequent rates/percentages), completions, and bounce rates.
A truly great and useful business blog is a plethora of brilliant and informative posts, case studies and reports, relevant calls to action, appropriate graphics, and targeted landing pages. Great marketers don’t just create magnificent content, they are also constantly analyzing results and keeping a big picture view too. By employing a blend of macro and micro strategies, you can take a modest business blog and transform it into a lead-generating powerhouse. There just isn’t a more valuable way to capitalize on all that awesome content you’re creating.
Images (from top to bottom) byMhel Garcia, MailChimp, Compendium Blogware, Norbauer, and Basecamp.