Happy New Year!
Are you leaving additional sales leads and revenues on the table?
Industrial marketers who don’t use a business blog are missing a key component of feeding the top of their sales funnels. By not using every opportunity to generate high-quality leads, they may be leaving money on the table.
You can find lots of online articles about the advantages of using a business blog for building thought leadership, communities and humanizing your company. A business blog will help you do all that but what about finding new leads and more sales opportunities?
The answer is a resounding yes. A business blog is a powerful online marketing tool for inbound lead generation. A continuous stream of high-quality leads to feed the sales funnel and keep it humming is the lifeblood of industrial marketing.
To prove my point about business blogging for lead generation, here is an eye-opening statistic – marketers with blogs generate 67% more leads. The chart below shows the difference between B2C and B2B companies.
(Source: HubSpot)
A business blog feeds your sales funnel
Business blogs help marketers generate more sales leads by:
- Rapidly growing the number of pages indexed by Google and other search engines. It is easier and quicker to get your blog posts indexed than adding more Web pages. Traffic and potential leads increase as the number of indexed pages increases.
- Getting found by more prospects that are actively looking for solutions that your products/services can provide. Savvy industrial bloggers can write articles using carefully researched keywords and phrases that match these searches. The content on your business blog is unique and different from your Web site content which increases the number of keywords for which you can achieve high rankings in Google and other search engines.
- Driving warmed up visitors to your corporate Web site or landing pages by weaving in links within your blog posts. In-context links encourage your blog readers to click on them in their quest for additional advice, insight and guidance in solving their business challenges.
- Doubling or tripling your potential new leads by adding a social sharing component to your business blog. RSS feeds will help your readers stay current whenever you post new content.
- Attracting more industry analysts and influencers who are drawn in by your fresh, informational and educational blog content. They are more likely to add links to your posts in their articles and blog posts. That provides valuable inbound links back to your blog which in turn will improve your search engine rankings.
- Showcasing in-house subject matter experts with blog posts written by your engineers, product designers and customer support people. This will help in starting a two-way communication between your company and your readers leading to a community of interested prospects and loyal customers.
- Building trust and credibility by encouraging readers to comment on your business blog. Readers tend to view organizations that appear open and transparent as more trustworthy. Their comments can provide you great market and competitive intelligence at no extra cost. Remember comments can be moderated so you need not fear losing control.
To see business blogs in action, read my earlier post 3 Business Blogs with Proven ROI from Industrial Companies.
By taking the time to carefully define the purpose and the target audience for your business blog, you can create a new channel for sales leads for a lot less than other marketing strategies.
You will attract more visitors who are likely to convert into qualified leads if you serve up fresh content that’s written for your prospects’ and customers’ interests instead of pushing out more promotional content.
Are you using a business blog for generating new sales leads?
