Blogs are a great forum for showcasing your knowledge. They're also great for helping people diagnose their challenges and identify viable solutions...
But they're AWESOME for lead generation. Here's what you have to do to turn your stories into viable business opportunities.
What's missing?
If your b2b's blog isn't generating leads, something is off. I imagine this is creating a lot of hair-pulling induced stress, because it consumes a LOT of resources, doesn't it?
Without even looking, I'm willing to bet that there are at least 2 or 3 major pieces to the puzzle missing -
- You're not framing your posts around things people are looking for (keywords)
- There's no call-to-action (contact us and newsletter signups don't count)
- There's nothing of value being offered in exchange for somebody's contact data
I talk about the overall mechanism in great detail in this article: B2b Lead Generation Best Practices.
But here, I'm going to focus on the blogging aspect of it...
1: Relevant Blog Topics
Blog topics play a key role in the lead-generation process. Your blog topics should hit all three of these points:
- Supportive of one of your lead magnets
- Relevant to the pain your company solves
- Address a specific persona
I will typically develop my blog topics as I'm creating the content offer idea... which comes from interviewing existing clients and building out personas. It's important that you're writing about things that are contextual, and that help people solve problems.
Equally important is the connection between the blog itself, and some sort of conversion mechanism related to it.
2: Content Writing
Don't let your personal agendas get in the way of writing something useful. We're not here to sell. This is about educating. Being supportive of your lead magnet means that they're related. Downloading or clicking to another page in your website should feel like a natural next step to reading the article.
Step 3: Structuring
Throughout the post, make sure you link to other articles and lead magnets. People are coming in at all stages of the buyer's journey, and they have individual interests. By providing more paths, you increase the odds that they'll stumble onto something that resonates enough to divulge their contact information.
I will typically link to several points of the website and related articles.
At some point, usually near the bottom, add a Call-to-Action (CTA). But experiment with this. High traffic articles are great places for discovery.
Step 4: Landing Page Optimization
As mentioned earlier, having conversion mechanisms is critical to generating leads through your blog posts.
20% or more of all landing page visitors should be filling out the form. If they're not, there are a handful of things that could be responsible:
- The landing page doesn't align with visitor expectations
- There could be formatting issues
- The offer itself isn't valuable enough
Optimizing it means making incremental, measurable adjustments until you reach your goal. Here's a screenshot of some of our content offers and the conversion rates they currently carry (spoiler alert, this recent snapshot reflects multiple iterations before hitting these metrics, and we are STILL optimzing):
To give a little context to the graphic above, the Growth Plan Builder has a high submission rate, but low contact creation rate, because it's Middle-to-Bottom of funnel, which means most people who do it have already become a lead.
The "Marketing Plan for Inbound Lead Generation" is an inbound lead gen playbook that usually gets downloaded after somebody reads the "Guide to Getting Started" with inbound, which is the offer at the top of the list.
CONCLUSION
Generating B2B sales leads with your blog is still an effective way of landing great opportunities for your salespeople, but you have to have a plan that includes topics people are interested in and looking for answers to, calls to action that help them find more answers, and access to something that provides value outside of your website.
Want to learn more about our b2b lead generation services? Check us out here:
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