Improving Lead Generation Using Your Company Blog

If you’re looking to increase your company’s digital presence and lead generation, one place to spend time auditing is your company’s blog.  Does your blog do a good job of answering questions your buyers have? Are you consistently blogging and optimizing your posts for SEO? Are your titles compelling enough to attract the reader’s attention?

I could list numerous more questions to ask, but in this post I wanted to specifically talk about how your blog should function as a triage for your lead generation efforts by creating momentum with visitors who are likely to buy.

Since the end goal of a business blog (or any customer facing content asset) is to stimulate demand and generate enquiries, here are a few tips to increase conversions:

OFFER RECOMMENDED READING

Like what you’re reading here? At the bottom of this post there are additional resources that are related and relevant to lead generation.

Offering visitors another post on the same page gives them a reason to stay and click around other content. Related post plugins like this can also help with SEO.

OFFER DOWNLOADS

Many marketers spend countless hours/dollars creating outstanding eBook and whitepapers only to use them sporadically in email campaigns. Apply a bit of creativity on your blog and showcase your solutions with an offer to download related content. Offering downloadable content on your blog increases your website’s secondary conversion points, and a great way of generating reconversions.

SOLICIT FEEDBACK

Show that your blog isn’t just one way communication by asking for feedback. Serial Atlanta entrepreneur, David Cummings, does a good job of always ending his blog posts with a question.

Encourage discussions by seeding comments on new blog posts so visitors aren’t shy about being the first one to comment.

Use your site’s analytics to establish which topics people liked the most.

GAIN PERMISSION TO SEND SPECIFIC UPDATES BY EMAIL

Email remains critical to business marketing communications– securing an opted-in email address is a primary goal for most businesses in the process of building a new business pipeline.

Dig a bit deeper and you can build targeted email lists based on specific site content.

Targeting content at niche groups builds trust and moves a minority towards transacting.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY

Don’t give up! Most blogs fail in the first few months because companies start one with the best of intentions, but then quickly realize it takes time, money, and resources. If you’d like some help identifying your buyer personas and coming up with a content strategy feel reach to reach out to us. We’d love to help.

What other demand generation techniques have you used on your blog?

Related Resources

Why Web Analytics Are Important

How to Drive Traffic to your Website

Maximizing Social Media Through Email

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Boost Your Content Marketing with Email Campaigns

A properly-implemented email marketing program is a tool that can improve the impact of your overall content marketing effort by keeping your audience engaged, driving traffic to all of your content, and helping build stronger relationships.

It’s also important to note that email marketing is not a successful marketing strategy on its own. Rather than using it as an isolated tool, your marketing efforts will be far more successful if you properly integrate email marketing into as many inbound campaign channels as you can.

In my latest blog over at Mediacurrent.com, I share 5 tips to help amplify your content marketing with email campaigns. I discuss:

1. The importance of building your lists
2. Tips on leveraging all your content…even the older stuff.
3. Tips of segmenting wisely
4. Tracking your email campaigns as part of your complete marketing analytics
5. Thinking mobile first

Read the entire post “5 Tips to Amplify Your Marketing with Email Campaigns” and share your thoughts. You can also follow me @adamwaid.

5 Ways Your Business Should Be Using Marketing Automation

Recently, I wrote a blog post, “5 Things You Should Consider Before Purchasing Marketing Automation”. Since then, I’ve had numerous follow-up conversations from customers, colleagues, and friends that were considering marketing automation but wanted to know why they should use it within their organization.

Reports of automation adoption is projected to hit 50% by the year 2015, which means that over the coming years many of you will begin using marketing automation.

In the past eight years, I’ve evaluated, purchased, implemented, and used over ten different email marketing and marketing automation platforms. Here are a few suggestions how your organization should be using marketing automation.

1. Predicting long-term value and identifying prime cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

A prerequisite to effective targeting is a more complete understanding of your customers, which can be obtained through techniques such as defining your buyer personas, customer profitability analysis, churn/retention analysis and behavior analysis.

With marketing automation you don’t have to limit yourself to simple demographics like age or job title. You can target leads according to how they responded to previous campaigns, or how they interacted with your web site.

Targeting helps answer questions like:

1. Which customers are good candidates for cross-selling or up-selling?
2. Are you recruiting high-value customers or low-value customers?
3. How can I quantify shifts in behavior, predict long-term value and identify prime cross-sell and up-sell opportunities?

2. Sending specific messages to a mass database

No matter how large your target market, it is composed of individuals, with individual characteristics and preferences. Therefore, the key to effective mass marketing is not to treat your market like a mass. The more in-depth your intelligence about individual customers, the greater the effectiveness you will have with your marketing campaigns. You should be programmingspecific messages to be sent in response to visitor actions, such as purchase confirmation, key pages on your website, or shopping cart abandonment.

3. Nurture your leads until they are ready to buy.

Research says that 84% of qualified leads are not ready to buy. I’m sure from seeing your conversation rates, you know that most people who visit your web site are just browsing – they’re not ready to buy. But down the line, many will be.

Capturing their information, with a piece of gated content for example, you can set up a series of communications designed to take them through the buying process. Based on their behavior, you can score prospects from “cold” to “warm” so that your sales team can allocate their time to the leads ready to purchase.

4. Tracking the ROI of your social media reach.

In 2012, a Satmetrix study reported that 67% of companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement. For B2B companies, this figure rises to 75%.

Many of the marketing automation software providers solve this problem by providing integrateddashboards, which deliver analytics across all platforms including social media campaigns. I like to cross reference Google analytics with the marketing automation reports to see consistency and accuracy.

5. Deepen relationships with your current customers

Obtaining detailed customer knowledge is one thing; effectively integrating it into future marketing campaigns is another. With marketing automation you can measure the effectiveness of a campaign against the goals you established and then use that information to improve future campaigns.

Did the customers respond, and if so, how did they respond? Did you achieve your objectives? This information is critical to capture, monitor and incorporate back into future planning phases.

Through this ongoing process, you will gain an ever more accurate picture of your customers’ wants and needs, leading to more effective campaigns over time.

Marketing Automation and Drupal

A strong lead management process requires B2B marketing professionals to respond to each prospect within the buying process. However, as your business grows, understanding and responding relevantly to a buyer’s interest is almost impossible to do manually. To ensure that your marketing efforts are targeting customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, a marketing automation software is key.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation software brings together content assets such as landing pages, emails, web events, etc. and delivers them to prospects at a time when it is most relevant to them in their buying cycle.

Knowing the “right time” is key to effectively engaging prospects with your brand. Conducting an analysis of your target audience and capturing demographic information, along with their interactions with your brand through your website and social platforms, allows you to qualify a lead and deliver to your sales team. Most marketing automation platforms integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs, so your sales staff can most likely continue to use their existing tools.

Marketing automation and Drupal?

I’m skipping ahead in the process and assuming you’ve already determined that you need a marketing automation software. The question now is “how effectively will this software integrate into a Drupal website?”

Drupal is definitely one of the better marketing platforms, and with a simple install of custom modules, the most popular marketing automation platforms can quickly be integrated with your Drupal Site.

Below are just a few examples of custom Drupal modules that have been created for marketing automation platforms:

• Marketo Munchkin Module – (created by Mediacurrent‘s Damien McKenna) The Marketo Munchkin is a very simple module to output the Marketo Munchkin tracking code obtained from http://www.marketo.com/.
• Eloqua Module – This module allows you to build webforms that directly parallel forms in eloqua, and can thereby be posted into eloqua.
• Pardot Module – This module adds Pardot web analytics directly onto your Drupal site. It supports general visitor tracking, path-based individual campaign tracking, and path-based lead scoring.
• Built In Module to Replace 3rd Parties – This module serves as a locally hosted replacement for 3rd party services like Pardot, Marketo or Eloqua, allowing you to track individual user paths through your site and assign rules for marketing automation in the form of drip campaigns triggered from user interaction.

Conclusion

Personally, I recommend every Marketing and Sales Director investigate marketing automation software. To truly grasp the value provided by marketing automation, a level of understanding is needed, which only develops from in-depth personal experience with the technology, or a thorough investigation of its core features and functions. In either case, plan to spend a significant amount of time learning the ins and outs of the solution features. However, I strongly believe that companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently.ketin

No “More” Marketing

We (consumers) are in an era that Jay Baer calls an “invitation avalanche.”

Think about it. Every where you turn you’re being invited to follow, friend, find, like, or share not only company’s information, but friends and family too. Even when your mom puts a message on Facebook, it dilutes all the other messages that are being shared. Messages that marketers are trying desperately to get you to engage with.

Marketers today not only have to compete with other businesses, but with everyone else that is sharing information. Not just on Facebook, but all social and email platforms. At lets face it, consumers go to great lengths to not encounter “marketing.”

How Do You Get Marketing Messages Seen?

Certainly not with “more.” Can’t we all agree that we don’t need to read more tweets, more Facebook updates, or more emails. What we (marketers) need is relevance. Or another way to say it is, helpfulness.

Case in point: Geek Squad. They have posted hundreds of “how to” videos on their Youtube Channel. These videos teach the exact things they charge customers for.

“Aren’t they giving away their business” you ask.

Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, was speaking at a conference a while back when a   member of the audience asked “Robert, you guys are in the fixing business, yet you’ve got all these videos that show people how to fix stuff without you. How does that make business sense?”

Robert responded with humor but dead on. He said “our best customers are the people that think they can fix it themselves.”

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve certainly paid for services like Geek Squad because I thought I could handle the project myself, but then quickly realized I was out of my depth of knowlege.

“Friend of Mine” Marketing

Your content should be so compelling that your audience allows your brand in their inner circle. Jay calls this “Friend of Mine” marketing. Meaning the content you’re producing is so relevant, that once your  target audience needs help, they are not going to “Google a company”, they’re going to call you. After all, they’ve watched your instructional videos, read your blogs, and downloaded your whitepapers—all of which were helpful to them.

Remember though, it’s not a quick close. Being useful in social media and content marketing is all about the long game.