Have you been disappointed that your experience does not seem to match the widely reported HubSpot and Social Media B2B research that shows companies with an active blog generate 67% more sales leads than those without blogs?

Looking for Sales Leads and Customers_stick figures

Blogging well takes time and considerable effort, so whatever your blog’s goals, you want to measure your success. Yet generating traffic and making the most of your blog is an interdisciplinary skill that needs to be mastered. If done poorly, a blog can even negatively affect your sales because the poor quality of the blog can be seen as an indication of the quality of your general business practices. Here are some tips on making the most out of your blog by converting casual blog readers into customers.

Offer solutions to problems

One of the main reasons people use the Internet is to find answers to their problems. Your blog’s readers read your blog because they believe it will help or benefit them in some way. It is safe to say, humans in general are often very fickle. If your content doesn’t give them reason to come back, then they won’t. (Readers look for the classic WIIFM – what’s in it for me.) Consider the benefits of using your product or service and try to relate it to the problems that your customers have. First you need to find out what problems exist and you can do this by looking at what questions people are asking on forums within your industry, on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Quora, which allow users to ask and answer questions. Find out the key industry questions and simply answer them. Then you can go back to the site where the question was asked and let the person asking the questions know that you have answered their question on your blog.

Inform rather than sell

Providing solutions to problems is a good way of converting traffic to your site into sales. But members of the digital generation are very good at smelling a rat. Your potential customers want to feel as if they are reaching their own decision rather than being “sold to.” When writing your posts, you do not need to mention your product at all. When you do, talk about the problems your customers might face, and if you mention your brand, offer statistics and talk about how your product solves these problems.

Make use of case studies, positive feedback and events you attend

Has anything positive happened to you or your business lately? Then let your readers know. Compile positive feedback and case studies about how your service or product helped a customer and post it on your blog. Your target market may be following events in your industry and if you are attending that event, why not tell your customers by mentioning it in a blog post before and after the event.

Analyze which posts convert

To keep writing blog posts that convert into sales, you first need to know which topics and types of posts convert. Use web analytics and call tracking technology at the visitor level. These tools will show which posts result in a sale and which posts do not. Web analytics tools can show the number of people who read a particular page and then go on to purchase a product from your website. Visitor level call tracking technology can show the number of users who made a phone call after reading a particular blog post.

Two often overlooked basics

  • Set up alerts and monitoring for social media conversations around your company and industry keywords
  • Engage the sales team in developing content, contributing to conversations and responding to inquiries

If you remember that helping your potential customers should be the focus of your online strategy, your blog (and customer conversions) will thrive and grow.

Resources

B2B Marketers Need To Get Real About Social Media and Customer Engagement (Forbes)

Manufacturers Sign on To Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (Wall Street Journal)

LinkedIn: Pages Vs. Groups Vs. Answers (marketingland.com)

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photo CC via flickr:  Ron