Intelligent Business Development for B2B Sales Growth

Turning a Company Blog into a Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing Engine Requires a Planned and Managed Approach

In a previous post titled A Company Blog – Don’t Overlook this Lead Generation and Nurturing Tool, I talked about how a well-managed company blog can be a key component for effective lead generation AND lead nurturing, and this is true for B2B and B2C. 

But, what does well-managed really mean?  Just putting up a blog and putting stuff out there in an undisciplined, unplanned fashion is not likely to generate leads for your business.   For now, let’s identify 6 fundamental things you must do if you want to turn your company blog into a lead generation and lead nurturing engine.

1. Don’t be overtly self-serving.  Your blog should deliver content that is meaningful and of value to your prospects and customers.  Too many company blogs are glorified press releases, or worse, thinly disguised sales pitches.  Focus your content on your prospects and customers’ interests and pain points.  Provide information that helps them with their problems.  By doing so, you gain credibility when/if they decide to purchase your type of service or product.
2. Make it easy for your prospects and customers to keep up with your company blog.  A mechanism for them to subscribe can be very powerful when it comes to lead generation (and lead nurturing).  Subscribers should be automatically notified via a succinct email every time you post new content to your company blog.  For lead generation, this keeps your front and center until they are ready to take some action.  For lead nurturing, it keeps them engaged until they are ready to make the buy decision.  There are many approaches to getting subscribers that we’ll talk about in future posts
3. Drive Blog Traffic into your Sales Funnel.  Having hundreds of views a day will do you little good if you don’t get visitors into your sales funnel.  A key way of doing this is to compel your visitors to raise their hand by filling out a simple web form.  You do this by offering them something of even greater value, like a download of a whitepaper, webinar, survey results, specialized tools, and other resources they deem valuable.  You can have the action step on your blog directly, but, for a variety of reasons, a better approach may be to drive visitors to purpose built, tightly managed landing pages on your site. 
4. Blog regularly.  While this may sound easy, it most certainly is not.  Producing good content takes time and effort.  It is very easy to fall into the trap of “I don’t have time”.  Two to three times per week is a good target in my experience.  And, remember every piece of content you put on your blog does not have to be something you or your organization produce from scratch. There are other effective approaches for getting great content.
5. Build compelling titles that are keyword optimized.  Every blog post creates a web page, and those pages are great opportunities for you to optimize that page to rank well in google and other search engines for keyword phrases you care about.   The title and the URL for each page are the most critical components for SEO and ranking well.  Make sure both are well constructed.  And, don’t forget compelling.  Titles should create curiosity and interest.
6. Make it easy for to spread the word. Use social bookmarking & news tools like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.  Make it easy for a ready to Tweet your article.  Follow and leave thoughtful comments on related (not competitive) blogs and make sure your name links back to your blog. 

There are many other, more refined things you can do to optimize your blog’s ability to be a lead generation engine.  In future articles, I’ll continue provide other specific strategies and approaches to help you start an effective company blog, and turn that blog into a Topline Growth System.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss how to make a blog part of your internet marketing and lead generation system and, as always, your comments/thoughts/suggestions are welcome.