If your web site includes a blog, are you using it effectively? If your site doesn’t yet have a blog, you are missing a valuable opportunity! Without a blog, your web site can quickly become a stale billboard leaving your customers who have already visited and read your copy and content without any motivation to return. A prospect visiting for the first time, can today sense a stale site within millisecond of a home page loading into view.
Using a blog enables you to keep fresh, relevant content in front of your customers and prospects, as well as feature solutions to their challenges, keeps open a connection for dialogue and enables you to demonstrate that in this ever rapidly-changing world, you are up-to-date and in-tune with what’s happening and what’s new.
Don’t Sell – Discover Needs and Provide Solutions
Think of your blog as a friendly, interesting, ongoing conversation you’re having with your customers and prospects, in which you are both sharing valuable information. You are providing nuggets of potentially valuable solutions that your customers need to grow their business, generate more leads, increase conversions, reach new targets, etc., and your customers are providing you with important information about their sales and marketing challenges, goals, needs and priorities.
Your 3-Part Blog Strategy
1. Appeal to a Broad Audience
Offer in a series of blogs, a broad range of typical customer sales or marketing challenges related to your area of expertise, and some helpful and valuable information and solutions. Provide just enough information for a customer or prospect to want to know more.
2. Get Your Prospects in your Lead Funnel
Place a few “Learn how we designed a solution to this challenge” links within your blog that feature some additional details. Find the balance between providing enough information, but only enough that they’ll need to reach out to you for your help). Change and test exactly how your links are worded — that’s critical to helping you determine exactly what information your prospect(s) are most interested in learning about.
3. Nurture Your Leads and Create Customers
You’ve turned a prospect into a lead once they’ve read your blog, and clicked on one of your links. Now nurture your leads to create customers! Capture the name and email address and provide a white paper with more details and testimonials, offer to send more info via e-mail, invite them to attend your webinar, etc., but always offer among the choices, a personal phone call, which is usually the highest level of interest. But don’t rush it – nurture it! Use the prospect’s chosen method of connecting with you until they request the call, or you feel comfortable that you’ve developed a dialogue.
The secret of ALL marketing is testing … so test within all 3 steps above, including the amount of nurturing needed. But follow these steps and you will definitely turn more leads into customers.