Are you dubious about the effectiveness of businesses blogging? Don’t worry, you're not alone - many businesses who use blogging without a clear strategy to move leads through the funnel tend to ask is the effort worth it? However used correctly, business blogging will increase engagement and improve your sales pipeline.
Companies that increase blogging from 3-5x per month to 6-8x per month almost double their leads. (source: HubSpot science of blogging).
Business blogging is your opportunity to inform and engage potential customers, whilst showing off your brand personality, expertise and providing an edge that differentiates you from your competitors.
To stay ahead of the game and use your B2B blog to generate more leads and improve your sales pipeline, take a look at our top tips:
Guest blogging is a great tool that can enhance your reputation and increase exposure. By offering some posts up for other sites to publish, you can reach a much wider audience who can then click through to your blog and become engaged with you. It will increase targeted traffic and your company’s SEO, as well as building relationships with other bloggers. Be sure to use relevant sites in order to produce good quality traffic.
In simple terms, each blog post should act as a page on your website.
Google ranks sites higher the more pages they have, so the more you blog, the more traffic you will get to your website and the more potential leads you will generate!
Aiming for one or two a week consistently is far more beneficial than churning out 7 in one day and then none for the rest of the month. Building this momentum will do wonders for your SEO and showcase to readers and subscribers the fact that you are a consistently reliable source.
When brainstorming ideas for the kind of content you want to create for your B2B blog, it's best not to focus directly on your business or your products (bear with me here).
The most successful business blogs don't sing the praises of the company. Instead they inform readers as to how and why the product or service they offer is the solution that meets buyers needs and solves their problems.
This way you create content that your prospects will find valuable and keeps them engaged throughout the buyers journey, and ultimately feeding into your sales pipeline.
Posting the link to your blog posts across your companies social platforms will immediately generate visits and leads. Your blog articles themselves should also be fully socially integrated with the ability to offer readers the chance to share, like and tweet your blog posts within their own community of followers and friends.
Mentions in the social media space are a very powerful way of spreading your company’s reputation. Plus if users are actively sharing your content then you must be producing valuable and informative information!
Blog articles provide the perfect opportunity to enhance your company’s link building and SEO. By inserting anchor text links as a call to action to both related blog posts and relevant landing pages on your website, you are increasing the ability to push traffic through the conversion paths you wish to map out and turn them into leads.
So blogging can help you fill the top of your sales funnel as well as convert leads. It can generate traffic to your website and help with SEO, which further increases your chances of being found by potential buyers.
Blogging is an essential component of an Inbound Marketing strategy, but in truth – it’s only the beginning! Once you’ve successfully attracted visitors onto your website with your blog and your top of the funnel lead generation machine is in operation, an extensive lead nurturing process must be brought into play to fill your sales pipeline and convert as customers. To find out how Inbound Marketing can achieve this for your business download our latest eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation.
Would you like to find out more about the power of content marketing and the increase in Lead Generation it can achieve? Why not give one of the team a call on 01789 262656 or get in touch at information@intellegentia.co.uk