Are you interested in how your blog can support your sales team by generating more high-quality leads and potential sales for your business? Do you want to increase the ROI from your marketing automation campaigns, and more effectively nurture leads towards converting?
Your blog and its content and articles can play a key role in your marketing automation campaigns and sales funnel if successfully integrated, helping you nurture and generate more high-quality leads for your salespeople, almost effortlessly. Your blog can support your automated campaigns in two ways;
- By being the first point of entry for potential leads, capturing new users for your marketing automation system
- By being part of your marketing automation, nurturing leads for your sale team
In this blog post, we will look at these two processes and, how you can refine and optimise your blog to becoming a lead generating machine.
Generating Leads With Your Blog
Your blog can act as the first point of entry for potential leads, spiking user’s interest before they even download your whitepapers or ebooks, and enter your marketing automation campaign.
Great news! But now, how do you go about achieving this?
1. Make Your Blog Content Searchable
Look at how people are finding their way onto your blog. Your blog could be attracting leads through organic search queries. That is why it is vital that your blog and blog articles are optimised for search engines, in order for them to rank organically for keywords targeted by your business and industry. Through simple on-site optimisation actions, you can quickly find your content ranking prominently for search terms used by and relevant to your potential customers, thereby driving traffic to your site, and also enabling you to capture user data for your marketing automation campaigns.
If you’re unsure about what your potential leads are be searching for, there is a great line once said by Richard Branson, to which I always refer to in these situations:
“You can never go too far wrong by thinking like a customer who’s new to the business.” – Richard Branson
2. Make Your Blog Content Relevant
Besides playing an essential role for your website’s SEO and marketing automation, your blog shows visitors to your site that your business is relevant.
Personally, if I see that a business hasn’t blogged for over six months, I consider that business to be either struggling or no longer active.
That’s why it is vital that your marketing team frequently writes and publishes relevant content about your business and industry that would bring added value to your site visitors and/or potential customers.
And don’t be afraid to be technical and go into more depths! Broad and in-depth content is something that your potential customers and leads are looking for.
Let’s use as an example, that your business supplies engines and spare parts for lorries and transit vehicles. Your ideal audience is not going to be any man or woman off the street, why would they? Your ideal audience, the one you want to target, will be logistic and transit fleet managers.
They are not going to be impressed by flakey, broad content. What will impress potential leads is in-depth, relevant content about your industry.
3. Link to your Whitepaper
Whether your downloadable content is a whitepaper, an ebook or a guide, you must remember to link to the page from which your content is downloadable.
Where better than your blog? If you’re producing high-quality content that is ranking for relevant industry key terms in Google, why not include a link to your downloadable content?
Integrate Your Blog Article As Part Of Your Marketing Automation
Once you have potential leads signed up to your marketing automation, your blog can play the vital role of lead nurturing to sell your business and services to them.
1. Know the Difference between Informative and Spam Emails
There is a razor-thin line between an informative sales email and spam.
If you’re noticing that a lot of your leads are unsubscribing to your emails, then you need to rethink what you are sending them, as clearly they aren’t being effectively nurtured.
This is why using blog content is vital for your marketing automation strategy.
On one hand, you are already producing relevant, in-depth content that is ideal for your marketing automation. Rather than sending a sales pitch, an email recommending a blog article that you’d feel is relevant and useful to them, is a much gentler approach.
There is also the fact that you are driving that high-quality traffic back to your site, thereby giving users the opportunity to engage with your sales team. This can be after the first email or the fifteenth you’ve sent, but the opportunity is there and your blog can become just that opportunity.
2. Remember to Softly Sell Your Business
As you’re approaching the end of your marketing automation cycle and your sales team are preparing to make that first engagement, do not be afraid to send or recommend content that makes your business attractive.
Using the engines and spare parts example, content on your business’ customer service or that demonstrates your expertise in the industry is ideal at this stage of the marketing automation process. You already have leads that are interested in your products or services, who have been returning back to your blog and have been nurtured by your content.
Why have they not engaged with you already? What is stopping them from getting in touch with your sales team?
These blog articles, or strategic pieces of shameless self promotion, could be the thing that seals the deals if done right. Focus on your USPs and what makes you better than your competitors. When you’re approaching the end of your marketing automation cycle, it is okay to push your chips in and go all in.
In addition, these blog articles that look at your business expertise and USPs, can also turn out to be another point of entry for future leads… and here starts the virtuous cycle!
Tips & Tricks for Lead-Generating Blog Articles
- Find What Works & Use it: When reviewing how your leads are entering your marketing automation, identify which blog articles are attracting the most leads and take advantage of it. Push that post on your social media channels. Also, dissect and analyse why this blog post is generating leads to be able to replicate this.
- A Blog’s Lifetime: People want relevant content, so blog articles that are over a year old might not be as effective as fresher ones at nurturing leads. Remember to pick fresh blog posts as be part of your marketing automation.
If you’re interested in how Ricemedia can optimise your business’ blog content and marketing automation, to help generate more business leads get in touch today!
