All Entries Tagged With: "marketing funnel"
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.
Do You Have A Blog Promotion Newsletter?
If you have a daily blog, one way to keep readers coming back to your blog each week is to promote it through a newsletter. A blog promotion newsletter can do a lot to increase your readership, your comments, and your bottom line. One happy customer has seen a huge increase in your blog readership and participation since starting her newsletter in January. Carolyn Melberg says:
Thank you!
I’ve gotten great feedback on the new format for the newsletter. People like the added value of all the articles (rather than just one per week), and the short blurbs so they can choose which ones they want to read on the blog.
Great work!
Caroline
The blog promotion newsletter is a unique product because it consists of nothing more than a link to every blog post from the past week. We include a short synopsis of each blog post, or a snippet from the blog post, in each newsletter along with the title of that post. The intent is to interest the newsletter reader in the blog and drive traffic to it. It works!
If you’ve noticed, that’s how we promote our blogs. Every week, Tuesday morning in fact, the NameCritic newsletter, “The Content Letter,” is sent out and we highlight three blog posts from each of our company blogs – SEO Service Provider, Blog Content Provider, and Article Content Provider. The readership at each blog has grown since we started doing this.
Why A Blog Promotion Newsletter Works
If you’ve been in marketing for just a short time then you’ve likely heard of a marketing funnel. Your marketing funnel is your plan for driving your customers deeper into a relationship with you. Online, the typical marketing funnel consists of offering free content or free information. Of course, not everyone will take your free offers, but by offering something free in exchange for an e-mail address or other valuable information, you ensure that you at least start a relationship with your target customer.
The next level in a marketing funnel often consists of a small purchase. After that, you may offer a larger purchase, and keep bumping your customers up a level as they learn to trust your knowledge and insight and want more benefits from your offerings. Businesses have been using the marketing funnel since the earliest of times.
Your blog promotion newsletter should be a part of that marketing funnel. You already have their e-mail address, right? What are you doing with them? Are they reading your blog? Why not?
The NameCritic Marketing Funnel
Most of our customers understand the two types of blogs: Onsite and offsite. The onsite blog is typically called a company blog and the offsite blog is called a promotional blog. They have different focuses in terms of how we communicate with customers and use SEO for your benefit. But sales usually don’t take place on either blog. What you really want to do is drive traffic to your website from your blog. The blog is a way to provide useful commentary on your business offerings and the benefits you offer, but it isn’t typically a sales tool. It’s a pre-sales tool. The website is where you close the sale.
But you still need to get your audience to your blog. Many people will subscribe to your RSS feed and read your blog daily because they follow it. Most readers, however, will not subscribe to the RSS feed because they don’t understand it. The latest figures show that only about 20% of blog readers actually subscribe to RSS feeds. That leaves 80% of your potential readers out there looking for your blog. How will they find it?
If they aren’t on your e-mail list, they’re finding your blog either through organic search, PPC if you are driving traffic that way, and social bookmarking sites. If your customers aren’t searching for you that way then they likely aren’t reading your blog. That’s why you need to use e-mail to drive your current customers and potential customers to your blog.
Everyone is using e-mail. And since everyone uses e-mail, why not communicate with your audience that way?
In a separate e-mail to us from Caroline Melberg, she had this to say:
Just thought I’d drop you a note of thanks … I’ve had a great increase in comments on my blogs, and I’ve noticed a definite increase in my search engine rankings since you started blogging for us.
The strategy we use for Caroline’s blogs are the same we use for all of our client blogs – well-optimized content, social bookmarking (an add-on service), and driving traffic to her website by writing intelligently about her service offerings. There is one additional service we provide for Caroline that some of our customers have not tried yet – we use a blog promotion newsletter that goes out to Caroline’s list once a week and promotes her blog to her current list of customers and potential customers. We didn’t build the list. Caroline did. But we use the list to promote her blog and it looks like it’s paying off. I’m not a bit surprised.
Chances are, we can do the same thing for your company or promotional blog. If you have an e-mail list that you communicate with on a regular basis, or a list that you are not using, give us a shout and learn how a blog promotion newsletter can benefit your business.
