These days, online marketing is by far the method of choice for any business trying to increase its sales and market share, regardless of the industry. Whether your company provides a service or product, all companies can benefit from search engine optimization. One of the most important ways of generating new business and targeting your customers is through lead generation.
Lead generation utilizes marketing techniques to help you identify and engage with your target audience in a way that ensures they go from potential customer to paying client.
Begin Maximizing Lead Generation Through Your Blog With These 7 Habits
One of the best ways to increase the number of leads you gather is through a lead generation blog. But, how can you be sure that you’re utilizing the best tactics to maximize your results?
Today we’re going to discuss how to improve lead generation by optimizing your blog to reach a wider audience. Follow these seven steps, and you’ll be on the way to growing your online presence and generating more leads.
1. Pick Your Audience
This should already be a significant part of your sales strategy, but it’s so crucial that I’m going to highlight it here. When it comes to building your business, you have to know to whom you’re selling. If you try a scattered approach (“we appeal to everyone!”) then you will ultimately wind up with less as you are spreading yourself too thin. The best companies are those that have a strong brand identity and connect with their customers on a personal and focused level.
As such, your lead generating blog should be dedicated to your target audience. Is it teens who want to know the latest celebrity gossip? Is it industry professionals looking for information about new trends? The more focused you can be, the easier it is to create lead generating content that will boost your subscriber numbers.
2. Know Your Audience
To keep things simple, let’s say that you’re looking to generate leads for your moving company with your blog. If that’s the case, then it’s imperative that you know what kind of information your best customers will value the most as well as who these potential customers typically are, and then generate content that appeals directly to them. If you are writing generic articles about moving without relating it to the specific people that make up your audience, you will lose their interest and sacrifice leads.
It’s always important to write engaging content, but you should also be looking at the content that gathers the most attention. If you write a post that gets 100 shares and another that only gets 25, you’ll be able to see what type of material your audience prefers and enjoys.
Understand what your audience wants. If they are looking for informative articles that provide deep insight into a problem, then that’s what you want to provide. If they are looking for something entertaining, then fill that need. Avoid generating material that doesn’t pique their interest or engage them directly.
3. Pick a Goal
While your basic outcome is going to be “increase my leads,” you want to be able to quantify your success as much as possible. First, it’s crucial that you understand where you currently are regarding leads so that you know can measure. For example, if you get about a dozen subscribers a week, then you should set a goal to reach 100 a week, and then 200, and move on from there.
What’s important to remember here is that you also want to be realistic. While it would be amazing to go from 12 subscribers a week to 10,000, that will take a lot of time and effort, and it could seem insurmountable. It’s far better to create incremental goals and see how long it takes to achieve them and adjust accordingly.
4. Create An Opt-In Form
What method do you have for getting leads right now? Do you have a pop-up that asks for their email as soon as they get to the site? How hard is it for them to enter their email? The point of an opt-in form is to make things as simple as possible for the user, as it will increase your odds of getting them to subscribe. If there is more than one step, it could cost you leads, so try to avoid making things too complicated.
5. “Bribe” Your Readers
These days, it’s not quite enough to just ask for someone’s email on the promise that they will get updates to your blog. You have to provide some incentive to make yourself more attractive than the competition. Even if you’re just starting out, there are ways that you can make your opt-in form more desirable. For example, you could offer exclusive content that won’t be published on the site, or early access before it goes live.
Another incentive could be that you offer the first part of your content and then request basic contact info in order for them to finish the rest. If you go that route, however, make sure that it’s something engaging enough to make that worthwhile; otherwise, it could leave a sour taste in your audience’s mouth.
6. Highlight Your Best Work
Not every piece that you create will be award-winning material, so be sure that you’re always putting your best foot forward. This means that you want to highlight the content that has the most likes and shares and keep it at the forefront of your blog. This will bring new users in and show them why they should subscribe for future material.
7. Analyze Your Results and Adapt as Needed
As I mentioned before, it’s imperative that you can quantify your success after implementing new strategies. As such, you want to make sure that you are analyzing your leads and seeing when you are getting the most. If you notice that you get more subscribers after a new piece is published, then it could mean that you should increase your content rate. If the number goes up after you move your opt-in form to a new spot on your blog, then that means that people pay attention to that section of your site more than others.
Once you’ve collected enough data, then you want to make sure that you are implementing new strategies that reflect these changes. Cut out material that doesn’t get you the leads that you want, and focus your attention on what is working the most. Overall, you should be refining your marketing materials on a constant basis so that you can manage sustainable lead generation.
Conclusion
There you have it, seven habits you can use to manage and optimize your blog for generating leads. Running a consistent blog that is optimized to provide quality and focused content to your best customers is one of the most important steps in growing your business & brand identity through online marketing.
