How do you use blogs to generate leads?
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— The LinkedIn Team
Blogging is one of the most effective content marketing channels for generating leads. But how do you turn your blog visitors into potential customers? In this article, you'll learn six strategies to use blogs to attract, engage, and convert your target audience.
Define your buyer persona
Before you start blogging, you need to know who you are writing for. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and data. By creating a buyer persona, you can tailor your blog content to their needs, challenges, goals, and interests. You can also use your buyer persona to choose the right tone, style, and format for your blog posts.
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Top Tip: Find the balance between writing for your audience and writing for SEO. Right now, that means creating longer content with 2000+ words that hit on several keywords and outranks the competition by volume and keywords. Link to relevant sources and internally, too! Create buckets of content for your blog: educational, informational, entertaining, SEO-rich content. Make sure to vary these on and off!
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A lot of companies still write for SEO, for Google, not for their customers. When I come into the company, especially in B2B, I see a lot of great blog posts that nobody has ever seen! The company maybe shared it once, in the company pages, and possible the author shared it on their personal profile. So 14 to 40 people saw it, including the relatives. 🤣 What I like to do it take those articles and turn them into posts, optimize them for social, and distribute them on the platforms where our target customers spend time, in the feed (organic or via advertising), via company page and via personal profiles, se text, with the visual, or along with the video. This is how we educate potential customers even before they are on the market to buy.
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Optimize your blog for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's visibility and relevance for search engines and users. By optimizing your blog for SEO, you can increase your organic traffic and reach more people who are looking for your solution. To optimize your blog for SEO, you need to do keyword research, write compelling headlines and meta descriptions, use relevant tags and categories, include internal and external links, and optimize your images and speed.
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There are several tools available online that can help identify what our defined audience could be interested in, what exactly are they searching for and what they really want to know.. Answerthepublic.com is one such platform that lets us research words for seo implementation in our blog and also helps define the theme.
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SEO is fundamental to driving organic traffic to your blog, which can be a valuable source of potential leads. When your blog posts are optimized for search engines, they are more likely to appear in search results when people are looking for information related to your products or services.
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Offer valuable and relevant content
The quality and relevance of your blog content are crucial for generating leads. You need to offer valuable and useful information that solves your audience's problems, educates them, or entertains them. You also need to align your blog content with your buyer's journey, which is the process they go through before making a purchase decision. By creating blog content for each stage of the buyer's journey, you can guide your prospects from awareness to consideration to decision.
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Content is the compass that guides your audience's journey, and its value is the currency that earns their trust. Crafting content that resonates across every step of the buyer's path isn't just strategic – it's a commitment to being the solution they seek, the guide they trust, and the source they can't wait to return to.
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It's important to create content that addresses the specific pain points and challenges your target audience faces. By understanding their needs and tailoring your content to provide solutions, you position your brand as a valuable resource in their eyes.
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Include clear and compelling calls to action
A call to action (CTA) is a statement or button that prompts your blog visitors to take a specific action, such as subscribing to your newsletter, downloading your ebook, or requesting a demo. By including clear and compelling CTAs in your blog posts, you can encourage your visitors to move further along the sales funnel and capture their contact information. You can use different types of CTAs, such as inline, sidebar, end-of-post, or pop-up, depending on your goal and context.
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A well-placed CTA can guide your readers to the next step in their customer journey, whether it's signing up for your email list, downloading a resource, or contacting your sales team.
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Steer your readers from inspiration to interaction with the power of well-crafted calls to action. These signposts not only engage but empower, transforming passive visitors into active participants. Just as a skilled guide leads through uncharted terrain, your CTAs navigate your audience toward meaningful connections and conversions.
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Create and promote lead magnets
A lead magnet is a free offer that you provide to your blog visitors in exchange for their email address or other contact details. A lead magnet can be a report, a checklist, a webinar, a template, a quiz, or any other valuable resource that your audience wants. By creating and promoting lead magnets in your blog posts, you can generate more leads and build your email list. You can also use your lead magnets to segment your leads based on their interests and preferences.
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Create a downloadable worksheet, guide or other helpful item (lead magnet) to go with each blog post. Mention the lead magnet in the beginning of the blog post. Add a very noticeable button at the bottom of each blog post that goes to a form where you will ask for the person's name and email address, in exchange for the lead magnet. If it's too time consuming to create an individual lead magnet for each blog post, create 4 or 5, and add the link to the most appropriate lead magnet to each blog post. Make sure you add the names and email addresses you collect, to your email list. Post all blogs on social media. Consider mentioning the lead magnet in the blog titles, (i.e. How To Write A Compelling Blog Post (with Downloadable Worksheet!)
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Creating and promoting lead magnets is great, but what kind of lead magnet performs the best? According to a study done by GetResponse in 2020 with a group of 790 marketers. They found that the best kind of lead magnets are Video- and text-based lead magnets. Both of them provide high conversion rates among your target audience.
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Nurture your leads with email marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture your leads and turn them into customers. By sending relevant and personalized emails to your blog subscribers, you can build trust, credibility, and loyalty. You can also use email marketing to educate your leads, provide social proof, overcome objections, and create urgency. You can use different types of email campaigns, such as welcome, newsletter, educational, promotional, or re-engagement, depending on your goal and stage of the buyer's journey.
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Now that you have target customers reading your blog, you need to maximize this engagement over the long-term. If you've added a CTA to your blog that gives you the opportunity to capture an email address, be sure you've planned for email follow-up that goes beyond the content in the blog and starts to weave together your product story. This is your opportunity to continue educating the prospect about the beneficial outcomes of using your product and deepening the brand/customer relationship. Your email stream should take your prospect down a path to purchase!
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Email marketing helps to warm up your acquired leads and is often heavily relied upon by marketeers, such as myself, to promote products and services, bring about awareness for new offerings for people who have engaged / bought your services before.
Here’s what else to consider
This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?
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Stay human! Personal branding has never been more important in the age of AI. AI-generated content has flooded newsfeeds and the discerning eye can tell. Leverage Generative AI for ideation and content creation, but remain authentic and ensure your brand voice is human. Connecting on an emotional level cannot be replicated by robots!
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I use my blog as a content hub and integrate other content formats and channels. This also directs people interested in my topics to my podcast, YouTube channel and last but not least to the Daily Dose Marketing on LinekdIn.
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