All Entries Tagged With: "Lead Generation"

Blogging As Lead Generation

How do you generate leads online? Do you have a strategy or is more or less hit and miss?

If you haven’t considered it before, perhaps you should consider blogging as a lead generation strategy. There are several reasons why a blog could deliver quality targeted leads to your website.

No. 1, by targeting your most important keywords, you are using the search engines themselves to deliver targeted traffic to your website. People who use the search engines search by keywords and phrases related to the information they want. By typing in the keywords and phrases that you use in your business – on your blog and your website – they are more likely to find you in the search engines and visit either your blog or website.

Secondly, a blog gets your website crawled more often. Every time you update your blog, which should be every day, you are inviting the search engines to your website to crawl it. When that happens you will get more pages ranked.

Every blog post is a separate and unique web page. By targeting your keywords and phrases you are building lasting search value through your blog. After one year of blogging you’ll 365 unique web pages on your website, in addition to the number of pages on your site, and that amounts to 365 ways to be found in the search engines for your key phrases.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on the potential for using a blog as a lead generation tool. If you haven’t considered it, perhaps you should.

Is Your Blog Outside Of Your Funnel?

When it comes to blog marketing, you’ve got to fit it into your marketing funnel somewhere. One of the biggest challenges to companies just starting out with a company blog is integrating the blog into their current marketing plans. It’s a challenge, but it can be done.

First, a definition of your marketing funnel. If you picture a funnel, with its large mouth at the top and it’s small exit at the bottom, you’ll notice that the entrance is where you meet your customer. You’ve got to have a lead generation plan that draws your customer in. Then, you want to canalize your customer deeper and deeper into your marketing funnel until you filter them out into the closing process. Where does your blog fit in to your funnel?

Here are some possibilities:

• Lead Generation – Many companies successfully integrate their company blog into the marketing funnel by making it their primary online lead generation tool. This is a very successful approach and one I recommend.
• Lead Qualification - Another approach that is success is to use the blog as a lead qualification instrument. It may capture leads as well, but in this approach the marketer usually has another method of marketing that drives leads to the blog (articles, pay-per-click, or something else) and then qualifies the leads with a narrow focus on the blog writing so that potential customers either leave the funnel because you don’t provide what they are looking for or stick around because you have something they want.
• Pre-Sales – Pre-selling must be done somewhere and a blog is a good place to do that. Many affiliate marketers use blogging as a pre-sales tool for the companies and products they want to promote. You can do the same thing with your own products and services, highlighting them and discussing features and benefits in a nonthreatening way so that your customers “warm up” to the idea of doing business with you. You aren’t closing sales on the blog, but you are making the sale possible by keeping your readers informed and driving the qualified leads to the final sales pitch and closing statements.
• Blogging for Sales – I’ve seen a few instances where closing sales on the blog is successful, but by and large that’s not what a blog is for. There are bloggers, however, who make this work and using your blog as a sales tool is something that you can consider as a part of your marketing funnel.
• Customer Service and Feedback – Another successful blog marketing strategy is to use the blog as an after-the-sale tool to communicate with customers. In this scenario you are using the blog to discuss ways the customer can benefit from what they’ve already purchased. You can receive feedback from the customer so that you can refine your product and processes and then regurgitate information back to the customer that is valuable and helps them improve the uses of your product for themselves.

Where in the marketing funnel you place your blog is not as important as deciding where you want to put and then following up on that plan. If you haven’t defined your marketing funnel just yet then I’d encourage you to do so before starting your blog. It will make the blogging more focused and successful.

Blogging, The New Telemarketing

Back in the 1980s it was widely known that telemarketing was the most cost efficient means of marketing for most businesses. That’s why everyone was doing it. For just a few pennies per phone call, you could reach your target audience at prime time when they were most available to discuss what you had to offer. Sure, you had hang ups, rude retorts, and lots of rejection, but for most companies, a single sell could pay for days or weeks of telephone calls. Not a bad ROI at all.

Telemarketing isn’t quite what it used to be. Even when the salesman called and people were rude in their response, they were talking to a real human being. Today, many companies are using automated dialers and computer-generated voices, which are ten times more annoying. I’d rather talk to the human telesales representative than C3PO.

Telemarketing’s Problem, Blogging’s Solution
Besides the automated dialers making telemarketing calls even more annoying, most people these days have called ID and screen their phone calls or just don’t answer the phone. With the don’t call list hanging over telemarketers’ heads, many companies have the additional expense of screening phone numbers in order to protect themselves from lawsuits or have diminished returns due to the cost of dialer technology, fewer results, and the higher cost of utilities. Telemarketing isn’t quite as cost efficient as it used to be.

Blogging, on the other hand, is. The advantages of blogging over telemarketing is that you can reach the right target audience for your product or service by allowing the right target audience to find you. It is less work to write daily keyword-rich posts that are found by people searching for information on your product or service than it is to buy a list, call the numbers, make the sales pitch, filter through rejection upon rejection, and then track your results and make sure the product is shipped to the right place. Spend $300 per month on a blog ghostwriter – compared to $300 per week on telemarketing in the 1980s – and you can get even better results. For many companies, one sale will more than make up for the expense.

One of our customers recently informed us that his company received three leads from their blog in one month. That’s a lead acquisition cost of $100. Multiply that by 12 and the cost of your leads is $3,600 for 36. Close on one of those leads on a product that will net you $10,000-$20,000 in revenue and you can see that the ROI is HUGE. And we’re talking about pre-qualified leads here. Blogging is targeted advertising at its best.

Telemarketing may not be as cost efficient as it was in the 1980s, but blogging, it seems, is turning into the most cost efficient means of marketing for the 21st century. That’s why companies are turning in their dialers for a blog ghostwriter.

The Importance Of Human Psychology In Blogging

I was recently notified that a client of ours received a sales lead through a blog that we write for them. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’m never surprised when I hear this because that’s precisely what a blog is supposed to do. This particular client is one who has been a customer for less than one month.

It’s important when blogging to think about what the customer is going to think when she reads it. A good understand of human psychology is essential. The thought process that goes into writing a blog post is one that requires a deep level of commitment to the human brain. And by that I mean simply that the blog post writer must consider the needs of the reader – the information and emotional needs – and meet those.

Great blogging is about more than search engine optimization. Of course, we always consider the SEO aspects of a blog post because if you don’t position your message in front of the greatest number of people within your target market as possible then it won’t matter how effective it is as communication. The message should communicate, but it also needs to be in front of a lot of people. That’s why SEO is important.

Conversely, getting your message before everyone in the world is not necessarily a good thing. If the communication is ineffective in drawing results then it doesn’t matter that 100,000 people saw it. Therefore, bloggers must have an ability to read readers’ minds.

That’s where psychology comes in. How will the reader receive the message? Will he be put off by it? Will it excite him or her? Will she pull out her credit card and make a purchase?

Closing the sale may not be the goal. In fact, for most blogs, the goal is not to close the sale at all, but to capture the lead. We want to drive traffic to your website so that you can close the sale. But to do that we must understand what it will take to get the visitor from the blog to your website. What will be the trigger that motivates the action? Bloggers who consider these things make much better bloggers than good writers who don’t.