A few times a year, we have a company-wide step challenge to see who can get the most steps in to foster some friendly competition and some good health. In fact, I just got back from a quick walk on my lunch break to see if I could squeeze in a few steps for today.

You’ve invested time, energy, and money on creating a great inbound marketing plan. You’re regularly publishing strategic content that is attracting new visitors to your website daily. You’re promoting your campaigns effectively with a mix of organic and paid efforts. But you just aren’t seeing the leads come in. Sound familiar? That’s because driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. What happens once they get there is what makes the difference between a visitor that comes and goes, and a visitor that raises their hand by filling out a form or taking an action.

There are many reasons why this might be the case, but I’m going to share three of the top reasons we see time and time again causing a low visitor to lead conversion rate.

Social media is an essential piece of your inbound marketing strategy. Once you’ve created valuable content, social media is a great way to deliver it to your target audience. In addition to being an effective content distribution channel, it can also help you increase your brand awareness and visibility, connect with your audience, capture leads for your business and even drive referral traffic to your website.

Before you begin seeing results from your social media efforts, however, you must start with a solid social media marketing strategy. Below we’ve shared a few tips for businesses that need to start building your strategy and leveraging social media as an effective inbound marketing tool. These tips are the foundation of a successful business social media strategy to help get you started and get you going in the right direction.

Salespeople and marketers often focus on the sales process to track a commitment. Different labels are put on selling steps, but generally they are seen as: identify, connect, discover, advise, and close. (Read more about our recommended sales process.)

What can be forgotten—and shouldn't be—is that a prospect is also going through a buying process, their buyer's journey, in sync with your efforts to sell.

Over the last several years, many organizations have purchased marketing automation software technology, hoping this would be the answer to a lot of their marketing problems. They knew they needed to do something different to build a more sustainable sales pipeline and help qualify more sales leads. And they knew that technology could potentially be the answer. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations woke up six months later and were really frustrated.

While working with a client recently, we noticed that they were seeing high numbers of traffic to their blog posts but not as many CTA clicks and conversions as we’d like. We felt that we were following all of the typical CTA best practices including a variety of CTAs for different stages of the journey and on various topics, smart CTAs, CTAs that stood out on the website, and so forth.

However, conversions still seemed slightly stalled, and we knew we could do more. So, we looked a bit closer at the analytics and found that the time on page was a little low – likely too low to actually be finishing the blog posts in their entirety and seeing our closing CTAs. This is pretty common in our content-rich world; people scan and then move on.  

I hear a lot of people in marketing and business development that tell me that they "blog." But I want to know what they are doing with their blog... are they getting results from their blog or just wasting time to say they "blog" with no proof of success? Do they even know? Or... do they even want to know?

Many of us have heard that personalized content is king in digital marketing. But what does that really mean? While over 91% of marketers surveyed say that they are doing content marketing, 65% of them say they are still increasing their efforts and 53 percent say they have small or one-person content teams serving their entire organization.

While the majority of marketers understand the importance of technology in their content marketing strategy, many still struggle to understand how to personalize their content marketing campaigns to their target audience. Technology has advanced the ability to segment and tailor your message based on customer data, but many marketers still struggle to identify the right ways to create a truly personalized experience for their B2B buyers. Fortunately, we've compiled these tactics to help you tailor your campaigns to deliver the right content to the right user, at the right time.

Here are five ways you can use technology to deliver personalized experiences to your customers to drive leads through the funnel and increase revenue. 

When creating content for your company blog, you’ve likely asked the dreaded question: What do we write about next? You may feel as if you’ve run out of post ideas or you’re writing about the same topic over and over. Regardless of your content dilemma, there are a few sources that you can use to extract new blog post ideas.

It’s important to note that when using these sources, however, the ideas aren’t always obvious and may not jump out at you instantly. Rather, this method requires you to dedicate time to collect information, analyze it, and brainstorm topics based on your findings. While this may take some time initially, it’s more than worth the investment. Not only will you have a list of new blog post ideas, but you’ll have the tools you need to create blog content that is relevant to your target audience - and their needs and interests - and that will most likely drive engagement and increase conversions.

Consider the following sources to help you generate more post ideas for your company blog:

Salespeople can be great sources of blog content. They engage with prospects and the market everyday. They're hearing questions and overcoming objections, and their responses to these questions and objections are great content for blog articles because this is what your prospects want to know, read, and learn.

THE CHALLENGE: How do you get your salespeople to get the info out of their heads and into the blog? How do you get your salespeople sit down and write?