When you are targeting leads, as a writer, you should remember that your blogging is not for readers, but customers. Precisely, you are not writing just to gratify the readers by giving a solution to their problem but you also wish to generate business from them. Can blogging help you with lead generation? Certainly yes, if it is structured in the right way.
Let us discuss, what all you need to have in place to get leads through your blogs.
1. Find a Trending Topic
Since you are writing for leads, it is obvious that you belong to a particular domain of business and you know who are your customers. For example, if your company sells financial products such as mutual funds, insurance policies, real estate, etc, you are most likely to give financial advice through your blogging. But what financial advice are your customers looking for? If you randomly choose to write on ‘How to invest money on real estate,’ it may not be a very popular topic in the current scenario since Real Estate market is down in India and probably people are not thinking about making such investments, how can you find a topic that is popular with your audience?
There are multiple platforms that you can review for the same:
- Buzzsumo: It is a content research tool, wherein by entering the keywords related to your industry, you can see what relevant topics are getting maximum shares on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
- Google Keyword Planner: Being another great free tool, you can find out what people are searching in Google. Here you can even find low-competition keywords related to your industry. Check the tool, it has a lot more to offer and it’s immensely helpful in finding out what people are searching about. Won’t that help you to find a topic that is popular among your targeted audience?
- Facebook Groups: For blog ideas, you must follow Facebook groups relevant to your industry. There are also some popular topics that you can dig down by referring to the member queries.
2. Align the Topic With Your Business Goals
Going forward with the Finance industry example; suppose, you have found out that people are searching about tax saving options. Based on that you decide to blog about ‘how to save tax and create wealth.’ The most popular tax saving product is the Public Provident Fund (PPF) as it’s a Govt. product offering guaranteed returns, whereas your company sells mutual funds. So, you can’t be writing about PPF if you wish to create a lead. Your blog must highlight how the mutual fund is a better tax-saving and wealth-creating option over other available picks.
3. Write for Readability
Although you are blogging for leads, you can never undo the fact that your customer is first a reader. So, you have to give the highest priority to his reading comfort. Therefore, ‘Write for readability’- you must have heard this a lot of times, but how to do that? Here are the points to consider:
- Choose a headline that conveys ‘How to do’ rather than ‘What to do’
- Give a ‘One-minute read’ section on the top of your blog. Here put the most highlighting or catchy line of your blog just as it has been traditionally done in newspaper articles.
- Formats like Step-by-step tutorial, checklist, multiple subheads, bullet points make reading a lot easier
- Best if you can make your blog visually descriptive. Adding an infographic to summarize the major takeaways from the blog is a good idea. For this try the designing app ‘Canva.’ It’s a great and easiest designing app where you can create pro-designs for your infographics, posters, Facebook, Twitter, etc and it’s Free. An infographic will give your reader a window for quick scanning and brings down the chance of your blog getting completely neglected.
4. Provide a Journey to Your Reader
Your reader gets into your blog page, reads it, likes it and then what next? If you are thinking that the reader will proactively make the effort of visiting your service/product page to take a step towards becoming a customer of yours, then you’re putting too much trust on him and also making his journey complex.
Remember we live in a time where we don’t even know what to type for searches, rather we want Siri or Alexa to do it for us. Point is your reader is busy and lazy, so you need to provide him a smooth and clear user journey. Once the reader is on your blog, tell him what to do next.
You may ask him if he wishes to read something more on these lines and can redirect him to your other relevant blogs by providing hyperlinks. You can also put a Call-to-Action button and welcome him to check out relevant products or services on your website.
5. Build a Resource Library
Your readers may not become your customers at the very first visit, in fact, that happens very rarely. So, you want him to visit you again, for that show him that you have more content resources that he may find relevant. Create a content resource library using your past content and showcase it on the right side on every blog page. Again, this will make it easy for your readers to have a journey to other prescribed blogs.
6. Pitch for Subscription
Until yours is an e-commerce site, there are fewer chances that your customers will visit your website again. But your blog can be the reason of their re-visits, for that, you have to give readers consistent reminders. So, pitch for Blog or Newsletter subscription by putting the ‘Subscribe Now’ option on your blog page. This will also help in increasing your email list thus giving you the platform to run your email campaigns.
7. Blog Marketing
Everything through which you intend to make sales need proper marketing and promotion. The same applies to your blog also. Along with SEO for Google ranking, you must market your blog on various other platforms, such as social media, emails, WhatsApp. Also, outreach to influencers and try to get the hyperlinks of your blogs in their channels.
Next time when you write a blog aiming lead generation, I hope this blog will give you some solution on how to structure your content.
