Can Blogs Contribute to Your Lead Gen Objectives?
With the economic challenges faced by B2B marketers, social networks and social media are looking extremely attractive as new tactics for reaching prospects and customers. Here are a few immediate tips for setting your company up to become part of the Social Scene. First let’s look at the blogging potential that exists in your company.
For B2B blogging, I suggest evaluating your objectives in the area of lead generation. How can you use blogging to attract, capture, convert and retain customers? It’s important to know which of these objectives will be in play for each of your blogs.
What is your B2B blog potential? Here are a few categories of blogs to consider – content expert blog, customer success blog, news blog, tech tips blog, event blog, training blog, special topic blog, etc. Look for areas in the company where you can help your customers get more out of their relationship with your company and use your product more effectively.
Attract Leads
1 – Expands web presence – Blogs expand the company’s web presence and provide more opportunities for web researcher to find you through keyword searches.
2 – Improves SEO results - Blogs help SEO results with new content that is also optimized. Regular new content that is optimized has a better chance of getting noticed by the search engines.
3 – Offers that are compelling and helpful to the target audience – These can be promoted on the blog, but also in other lead generation activities. Once on the landing page and once the offer is delivered, you can then direct the respondent to a blog that also covers the relevant topic that drew them to the landing page.
Capture Leads
1 – Relevant call-to-action - Make your call to action easy to see and relevant to your audience. White papers still hold the most popular offer as long as they are educational. The offer is very important so that you have a reason for your audience to give up their contact information.
2 – Registration form or email subscription form - Place the registration form either on the blog page itself, in a pop up window or on a separate landing page. Once you have captured the lead, ask them if they want to RSS the blog feed. Now send them back to the blog for more content.
Convert Leads
1 – Multi-stage email messages/newsletters – Once you have the respondent or prospect who has opted into your system you can begin to market to them. Now you can send a newsletter or email that promotes content they would be interested in and that content can reside on a blog.
2 – Multi-stage offers – Once the prospect has landed on your blog to read the story from the newsletter or email they received, they may want to RSS that blog feed. Additional offers of white papers, webinars, training, tips, etc. should be scheduled to nurture them and convert them through the buying cycle.
Retain Customers
1 – Provide useful product tips – Send email to your new customers with tips on using the products. Also direct them to a specific blog where they can find up to date information on product use, training and user forums managed from the blog environment.
2 – Invite your customers – To your Facebook Fan page, a Linked In special interest group, other relevant company blog.
With all the talk about building relationships with our customers over the years, social media and networking platforms and technologies have made it easier than ever to reach outside the corporate walls. Social Media and Networking company ‘policies’ are now starting to show up which may make for some challenges, but that just means that our legal folks see the writing on the wall. Social Marketing is here to stay.
The next Rithims blog post, Social Media and Lead Generation, Part 2 will look at email strategies to employ in combination with your blogs.
Cynthia Nowicki helps technology thought leaders, startups and B2B enterprises by implementing social media programs that expand the web footprint to attract, capture, convert and retain IT customers. Email me at cynthia@rithims.com or call me at 408-323-8148 for a no obligation assessment of your social media lead generation potential. Subscribe and you’ll receive blog posts by email.