I don't have to tell you that making the sale first requires enticing the customer. Engaging, informative content is one of the top ways to drive conversions, and a well-written business blog is a great way to spread that content. Here are some tips to make your blogging efforts successful.
Some companies start blogs on their company websites to publish news and company information. The problem is that few people actually care about that information.
The real purpose of your company blog is to attract new people to your website. A customer-focused blog puts your website in the path of ideal customers that are searching for information. Before finding your website, a potential customer may not have heard of your company, even if you sell to a niche audience.
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If you're going to attract and win ideal customers using your website, you're going to need to do the following 6 things:
Think about what information your customers will be searching for.
One way to find out is to listen to what is being said on social media (like LinkedIn Groups), where your potential customers pose questions and comments all the time. You can take these questions and create a blog post that is truly engaging.
At Whittington Consulting, we find that creating customer personas as part of a content strategy is helpful to understand what topics customers want to know about. Customer personas will reveal potentially hundreds of ideas for specific blog topics.
It's okay to create a blog post that mentions your products or services. The key to doing this effectively is not to push the sale. People often look for several alternatives or solutions, so describing them on your company website can give credibility and prevent people from searching elsewhere. Describing the pros and cons of each alternative can also help qualify prospects so your sales team doesn't waste time.
For example, check out this blog post where one manufacturer compares their technology to another.
While targeting keywords is one effective way to establish your blog's presence, another option is to share blog posts on social media. If you already have hundreds of LinkedIn connections, posting snippets of your blog can convince contacts to visit your website. This puts them one step closer to calling or getting in touch.
In addition to sharing your posts on social media yourself, be sure visitors can easily share them, as well. This means displaying social sharing buttons that are easy to see on your website.
When creating content, it is essential to take the time to narrow down your niche and create blogs that will appeal to your target audience. This is why writing down customer questions is so important. Their questions tend to be specific in nature, and search engines value content that is specific.
Specificity will provide customers with unique insight that makes your blog valuable by providing engaging information while bringing in new visitors from search engines.
If you're going to start blogging, be sure to target the right keywords in your blog posts to ensure that your blog posts will appear in search engine results. Here are some tips:
Blogging takes time and commitment. This means you shouldn't give up if the blog doesn't pull in traffic immediately. The more quality posts you publish, the more website traffic you'll get--and traffic leads to sales.
I particularly enjoyed reading this article about how one marketer was "a content marketing failure." His conclusion? He gave up too early. (Read the post here.)