Not only does a business blog offer an excellent means of positioning yourself as an industry thought leader, it can also dramatically improve your visibility within search results and encourage you to publish regular content that you can repurpose for use across other online and offline marketing efforts.
Yet one of the chief advantages of blogging for business must be its lead generating potential. Let’s assume that your basic blogging strategy is in place and your target audience is already finding your content – the good news is that they are often now ready to convert to paying customers – you just need to make it that bit easier for them with clear and compelling calls to action (CTA).
If you are not using CTAs to their full capability both within your blog and elsewhere, then you are almost certainly failing to maximise your blog’s potential to generate leads.
CTAs take many forms but they tend to have a unified purpose – that is to encourage readers to click through to landing pages and convert. Within your blog, CTAs may appear as banners spanning the width of either the top or bottom of the homepage. You can also use sidebars, which although smaller than banner CTAs, can still give a little extra oomph to lead generation rates.
Another very effective place to position CTAs is at the end of blog posts, or you could try experimenting with CTAs elsewhere within posts. Be wary though of more blatant approaches: carelessly positioning a CTA right upfront within articles can run the risk of alienating readers, having precisely the opposite effect to the intended conversion as they abandon your blog for other, less pushy competitors.
Wherever you position your CTAs, you can apply a few relatively simple techniques throughout to maximise their lead generating potential:
1) Keep designs fresh
Bombarded with visual information throughout the day, readers’ naturally learn to gloss over over-familiar content. Consider it a survival technique of the online age. But you can continue to pique their interest and ensure your audience is fully engaged by implementing regular re-designs, whether through an outsourced designer or in-house experimentations with graphics software.
2) Use offers within CTAs
Offers and incentives are a perennially attractive way to attract leads and conversions. For maximum lead generation, always think relevancy and freshness. Position offers close to related content – say you have created an ebook detailing the benefits of loft insulation, this would sit nicely as a sidebar CTA next to a blog post entitled ‘Why Should You Consider Loft Insulation?’. Keep updating your offers and creating new CTA’s accordingly to maintain higher conversion rates – even the most desirable offers become stale after a few months.
3) Use dynamic CTAs
CTAs do not have to be static. So while ‘The Basics of…’-style ebooks will work wonders with new traffic that is driven to your website via your blog, remember that you also need to appeal to your returning reader who tends to have more expertise and knowledge on your industry. Appeal to their more advanced information needs, rewarding their loyalty with next-level niche content (following on from our earlier example, something along the lines of ‘The Pros and Cons of Armaflex Foam Insulation’) displayed on smart or dynamic CTAs.
4) Keep experimenting with CTAs
Generally, we find that banner CTAs on a blog homepage, designed to stand out clearly from the rest of the page content, tend to drive the most click-through and conversions. But with all the data in the world, it’s sometimes hard to predict exactly which type of CTA and what positioning will work best with your readers. Try moving sidebars above or below the fold on your blog homepage, experiment with mid-post CTAs and experiment with various CTA designs to see what rocks your particular audience.
Perhaps you’ve implemented all of the above and still find that your blog’s visitor to lead conversion rate is low, or has perhaps just hit a plateau. Remember, none of these CTA techniques will have the desired outcome of generating leads and driving conversion rate unless readers click through to a positive landing page experience. It’s worth investing time in analysing, diagnosing and then optimising your landing pages to ensure that prospects actually go on to complete that all important conversion.
What tactics do you use to drive lead generation via your business blog?
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