by Fronetics | Mar 13, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Use these two strategies to help your blog generate leads faster.
Creating quality content for your blog that educates and engages consumers takes significant investment and resources. But, unfortunately, blog posts usually don’t deliver the immediate ROI that many companies are looking for.
A blog is an excellent lead-generation tool. But, as I’ve written about before, it takes time to generate leads and sales.
Like a fine wine, blog posts become more valuable with age.
Older content — likely, with more shares, likes, and referrals from other webpages — hold more credibility with search engines. The more credible the blog post, the higher it will rank in search engine results. What does this mean for you? The more time your blog has to circulate the internet, the more opportunity people have to read it, the higher it will appear in search queries. It’s that simple.
But your boss wants to see results in the form of leads and sales now. How can you bridge the gap between giving your blog the time it needs to become credible and boosting your lead-generating efforts for this sales cycle?
If you want to accelerate lead generation, it’s going to take a greater investment. But if you’re willing to commit more time and resources, here are two things you can do to see results sooner than later.
Two things you can do now to get leads faster
1. Publish more frequently.
Search engines value posting frequency because it shows that your blog is a consistent source of content. The question is, how much can your organization publish without experiencing a decline in quality and relevancy? Those are other factors influencing search engine rankings, not to mention readership, leads, and conversions.
But “more frequently” doesn’t have to mean going from 0 to 60. Even publishing once more per week can make a dramatic impact. This story, for example, shows how publishing one more post per week helped a client’s web traffic increase by 23%, sales leads double, and a prospect convert to a customer — and that was just in just one month.
A HubSpot study showed a tipping point around 400 total blog posts — blogs with 401+ total posts generated twice as much traffic as those that had published 301-400 posts. And more specifically, B2B companies with 401+ total blog posts generated nearly 3X as many leads as those with 0-200 posts. The faster you can reach that 400 mark, the quicker your results.
2. Don’t neglect your old content.
It’s important to keep in mind that the majority of your web traffic (aka potential leads) will first encounter your older content. Looking at Fronetics’ most-viewed posts last month, for example, 80% were published at least six months prior. In fact, 50% were more than a year old.
What does that mean? For one, you should keep tending to your already published content, particularly those posts that prove to be a consistent source of traffic. Update information; add links to new related posts or other relevant resources; and seek opportunities to insert or update calls-to-action to current offers and campaigns. Making sure those older, consistently popular posts continue to serve and engage your readers will increase your chances of conversion.
Secondly, it’s crucial that you look beyond how the posts you published recently perform. Something that doesn’t get a lot of views in the first week may be a huge traffic source and lead converter in a little time. Many content management systems, like HubSpot, can generate attribution reports, which tell you which web pages users most often visit before converting to a lead. Compare these pages with your high-traffic pages that don’t make the list to see how you can create more opportunities for lead conversion on the pages earning the most traffic.
If you invest the time and resources to run a blog, you owe it to yourself to see it through to success. Doing these two small things can get you there faster.
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by Fronetics | Jan 24, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Long-form content generates more traffic, leads, and social shares than shorter content.
We’ve all heard the aphorism, “quantity over quality.” But when it comes to content marketing, part of quality may well be quantity.
While it can seem intimidating, the value of high-quality long-form content cannot be overstated. According to a 2012 study, long-form content converted 30% higher than shorter-form, and the same holds true today. Additionally, long-form posts generate more social media shares and have a higher average Google rank.
Here are some ideas for generating longer-form content that engages and informs your readers, and promotes your business in a meaningful way.
3 tips for creating longer-form content
1. Know your audience.
You first and foremost consideration should be your target audience. Take the temperature of your readers by frequently checking your comments sections, social metrics, and Google Analytics. It can also be useful to conduct a survey, which serves the dual purpose of directly engaging and communicating with your readers and giving you valuable information.
2. Chose relevant ideas.
Read all the articles that are on the first Google search page for your topic, and make sure your post contains relevant information you find. You should be answering as many of the questions that appear in Google Suggest at the top and bottom of the search page.
3. Write good content.
It seems painfully obvious, but it’s worth keeping quality at the top of your priority list. The idea of longer-form posts is to keep readers engaged and encourage them to peruse as much of your site as possible.
Neil Patel suggests that if you “strive to provide enormous value with every word you write,” your writing becomes more targeted. Keep posts visually accessible and easily digestible with short paragraphs, subheadings, and relevant images. Another key element of good content is research. Posts that include actual examples and case studies perform better than data-free posts.
Creating longer-form content may mean that your business needs to devote more resources to its content marketing efforts. But the benefits are well-documented and far outweigh the cost.
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by Fronetics | Oct 3, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
The top-performing business blogs have these six things in common, from posting frequency to outsourcing writing.
Maintaining a blog for your business can be somewhat of a guessing game. How often should you publish? Should you do all the writing in-house? Will anyone read our posts?
A recent survey of 428 marketers conducted by Curata sought to identify any patterns or trends among those with the most successful business blogs. Specifically, the authors grouped together those whose blogs had more than 10,000 views per month and compared them to those with less than 10,000 views per month.
The most successful blogs (those with over 10,000 views per month) have several things in common. Here are some highlights:
1) Size doesn’t matter.
You may suspect that the larger the company, the more traffic its blog gets. That’s not the case. In fact, two-thirds of the most successful blogs were run by smaller companies (<$100M revenue).
2) Age is a factor, but it’s not everything.
Of the most successful blogs, 44% had been up and running for 5+ years. Time gives companies a chance to build up their readership and perfect their content strategy. Yet 65% of businesses who have had a blog for 5+ years did not get 10k+ views/month — meaning there is more to successful blogging than age.
3) Frequency is key.
Blogging frequency impacts factors like search engine rankings and audience engagement. So it’s no surprise that 90.5% of best bloggers blog at least once a week.
4) They set standards.
Interestingly, 80% of the best bloggers have a governance team for blogging activities. This can be many things: ensuring post quality and accuracy, determining best practices, outlining a code of conduct, etc.
5) Outsourcing helps.
The best bloggers rely more on external resources and less on internal resources. They outsource an average of 23.6% of their content production, compared to only 11.8% by blogs with less than 10k views per month.
6) They send more subscriber emails.
To promote their posts, 39% of the best blogs send a newsletter with their blog content to their subscriber base at least weekly. More than half of blogs with less than 1,000 views per month sent subscriber emails as infrequently as once a quarter or, in some cases, not at all.
Read the full report from Curata’s survey here to get more insight into the best business blogs.
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