We all know we need blogs so our audience can find us online through search engines and social media. It is the main essence of any content marketing strategy. As you begin to create and share content your organic traffic will eventually grow. But are you making sure that your valuable traffic is converting into customers? Do you generate new leads or lose out on potential customers as they bounce from your website?
Blog traffic is the first step of the conversion funnel, ideally, we all want visitors into customers and customers into prospects. A great blog lead generation strategy isn’t just about growing an audience but about delivering value while paving the way for sales. Let’s talk about the 9 ways you can leverage your blog to capture leads.
- Choose topics that resolve customers’ problems
The blog topics that most converts are the ones that answer a problem or bring solutions to customers’ issues. Topics based on pain points drive conversions. For instance, you might want to target an audience who wants to:
- Improve customer retention
- Make more sales
- Boost business reach etc.
You should provide a detailed framework for solving problems with the information, which is useful and actionable but doesn’t provide all the answers!!
Always leave room for a firm call to action that entices visitors to gain further information by completing actions like downloading a pdf, signing up for a free trial, making a purchase, or just mailing list.
- The skim reader’s format
We all have limited attention spans so we have to cater to readers who like to skim the highlighted parts and headings to decide if they want to stick to the blog or not. The skim reader’s rules are:
- Write in short paragraphs
- Use subheadings and bullets wherever appropriate
- Font and Font size matter
- Use images and infographics to illustrate key points
You can even take a step ahead and capitalize the most important keywords which you particularly want your customers to pay attention to.
- Know your audience
Understand it like this, the way you ask money from your mother differs from how you would ask it from your father, this is because you know their likes, dislikes, perception, and habits. Similarly, you need to understand your audience deeply through organizing events, inviting feedback, conducting polls, surveys, forums, seminars, etc. While these were offline methods, some online methods include:
- Analyze web analytics
- Session recording tools
- Capture easy-to-interpret heat maps
- A/B test to understand better results
- Frequent surveys
- Use natural CTAs in a blog post
Every blog post needs a call to action. If you are merely ending your blog post with nothing more than an invitation to leave a comment, you are missing your chances of conversions. You should compel your readers to do something like signups, free trials, subscribe, install, contact, etc. Sometimes small CTAs changes make huge differences. A string CTA creates a sense of urgency and is action-oriented. CTAs should also be easy to find and their location is important. If required use more than one CTA on your blog post. Some commonly preferred locations are:
- Top of the page
- Bottom of the page
- Inside the post
- In the sidebar
- Floating popup
- Sliding popup
- Full-screen overlay
Consider these CTAs to grab readers’ attention and to encourage social engagement, increase mail subscriptions or promote new products.
- Use Retargeting
Despite your best efforts a large chunk of visitors might not signup or download or go for free trials. It’s a part of online marketing and this is where retargeting comes in. Review your retargeting campaigns monthly or quarterly to achieve better results, also consider, marketing tools or services like Retargeter, Perfect Audience, or Adroll wherein a tiny piece of code called a pixel is placed on your website.
This pixel drops a tracking cookie on visitors’ browsers and then follows them around on the internet. These tools allow you to target your exit visitors with relevant offers on websites outside your blog.
Basically, that’s how you see ads about the products you just viewed on website A on other websites B & C later when you visit them. That’s retargeting doing its thing.
The pixel that follows them draws them back to your landing page giving you another chance to convert.
- Exit Popups
These popups appear when readers are about to exit your blog and will ask them to signup, subscribe or follow you on social media. This is a good way for bloggers who don’t have many followers to increase their chances of getting more leads by getting followers who are interested in their content.
The popups could be :
- Simple popup form
- Custom offer
- Feedback
- Ebook
- Course
- Discount
When used properly these can instill a state of urgency, increase leads and reduce cart abandonment.
- Create Urgency
At least once in our life each one of us has been prey to those offers that would get expired shortly, running with a countdown, a product with a good discounted price and only 2 pieces left, and so on. Well this FOMO emotion is an effective and tested marketing sales tool. Before we could even make a decision if we seriously want that product or not we have actually purchased it.
Let’s now understand how can we imbibe this in our blog posts.
- If your product can reduce the churn rate of a SaaS company by 20% in a month then turn these figures into a situation where you can depict how much revenue can be possibly lost in that given period if they chose not to use your product.
- Use language that invokes a feeling of urgency and start to write shorter paragraphs and sentences towards the end of your blog post to compel visitors to act immediately.
- Incorporate urgency into CTAs by offering some free e-books or discounted prices or free trials to the first 100 signups etc.
