Turning Your Blog into a Lead Generation Tool

Before any company decides to incorporate blogging into its marketing strategy, there are some important things to think about.  You need to identify your business objective before you go through the effort of building a blog.  Are you looking to add value to customers?  Communicate ideas?  Market products?  Generate leads?  Knowing this will help you to target the appropriate audience, develop a keyword and content strategy, establish metrics and be able to measure them.

While generating leads may not be the main reason for building your blog, I think most would agree that grabbing some potential sales would be great.   I came across an article that provided five simple tips on how to convert eyeballs into leads.

5 Ways To Turn Your B2B Blog Into A Lead Generation Tool

1. Use Advertisements and Special offers

2. Leverage Live Chat

3. Ask For Opt-in for E-mail Marketing
4. Have Sales Team Engage Through Comments
5. Write Posts That Actually Sell Stuff

Information from Hubspot shows the difference between monthly leads for companies who blog versus those who don't.  I found this lead gap to be pretty surprising, don't you? 

Whether you choose an industry expert, a spokesperson, a salesperson, etc. to maintain your company blog(s), it's important to keep in mind that frequent, relevant content is the most important part of any blog and is what will drive traffic to your site.  I came across this quote that I think is important for bloggers to keep in mind when they sit down to write:

“Small words spoken in truth can sway the minds of nations. But I don't care who you are, keep talking long enough and you're going to say something stupid.”

http://massa.techndu.com/2008/06/02/WhatsThePointOfBloggingAnyway.aspx

There are many ways to improve and tweak your blog, and if there's a market for what you're selling, the leads will come.   Just be sure that your messages are frequent, short and to the point, relevant, and intriguing to keep your readers coming back for more!

Why is Internet marketing so important?

The emergence of the Internet has brought many new challenges and opportunities for marketers. The success of businesses is no longer completely reliant on word-of-mouth and print advertising. Instead, today's business owners understand that the Internet is here to stay and in order to be successful in today's competitive environment it is essential to have a well-thought out online marketing plan.

There are many companies who specialize in Internet marketing and assisting organizations to develop their message, devise their online marketing plans, and implement them.  My company, The NPD Group, has been working with one of these companies - Prime Visibility - for a few months. Our main goal is to improve our Internet presence, and more specifically, our search engine optimization. In one of our initial meetings, Prime Visibility provided us with some statistics that I found interesting and relevant to the question at hand:


• Over 2 billion searches occur on the Internet each day
• 93% of users go to search engines
• 95% of users don't go beyond page 3 during a keyword search


In other words, if your company is not showing up on those first 3 pages, then your competitors are...and you very well could be losing customers simply because you do not have an efficient Internet marketing strategy in place.  According to a study conducted by Intellisurvey, Inc., paid placement and organic search engine optimization are the advertising/marketing vehicles that provide the highest return on investment, followed by email marketing.

Many businesses are very careful when it comes to spending marketing dollars, but the truth is most businesses have neglected the most effective marketing tool that they have which is the strategic planning of their Internet presence. I have no doubt that investing in an Internet marketing strategy is worth the money and I look forward to seeing how NPD's plan pays off in the future.  Has your company spent enough time thinking about its online presence?