If you are a B2B company utilizing a blog platform, then congrats! You’ve been keeping up-to-date with marketing and branding trends. If your company is not utilizing a blogging platform, then welcome to the 21st century, and get started!
But this post isn’t about the importance of blogging. You can find that information almost anywhere. This post is about ways to leverage the blogging that you are ALREADY doing, with some tips and guidance on how to get the biggest bang for your blogging buck!
Check out these 3 ways you can leverage your company’s current blogging strategy to get your website more leads, more lead conversions and a bigger return on your blogging investment:
The idea of writing a blog post is that a person sits down and has a lofty thought on a topic within their area of expertise to help answer a pain point of their target audience. Once this lofty thought is published, and they have the audience’s attention with a great article, the idea here is to give that audience even more. Adding a CTA button or hyperlinking to a page that has contextual significance to the blog post topic ensures a further engagement between the reader and the business. It’s like having dessert after a nice meal: not everyone will accept the dessert, but those who do really want it! It’s worth adding that offer to entice the reader’s appetite and gauging their interest in what you have to offer.
It’s not enough to just have a great resume these days. A lot of firms expect their employees to represent their company by having them build their personal brand. A personal brand is basically someone in the workforce who creates an image and messaging for themselves to set them apart from the rest of the pack. A great way to build your personal brand is by blogging! Not only does the blogging platform give you a stage to release your knowledge and help others who are looking for answers, it’s also a great way for your colleagues, friends, and family to share your thoughts easily to their social media channels. Blogging sets your career up to be a thought leader in the industry, it’s also a great way to tip the competitive edge against your professional peers to demonstrate that you have a blog following audience.
A blog can work for your messaging and branding and lead gen 24/7, but sometimes even the best-written posts can get lost and moved to the back over time with the amount of content that is published online every day. For this reason, you'll want to make your blog posts work even harder for you by taking a handful of some really popular, well-viewed posts and combining them into a whitepaper. Now it won't be as easy as just copy-and-paste. In order to give real value to a downloaded piece of content like whitepaper, you have to make sure that you are adding additional benefits to the combined piece. You may have to do some editing or updating to the copy, add images, maybe update some graphs…. But the idea is to re-use what you’ve already written to create a whole newly designed guide. The real magic happens when you make that guide a downloadable offer and generate online leads with minimal effort. This is also a great strategy when you don’t have a lot of time to write a new piece of premium content but are dying for new lead gen offers to put on your site.
A blog post doesn’t have to die the day after it’s publish date. Make sure you get every last drop of marketing-goodness from each blog post. It’s a tool in your marketing kit that has many versatile uses, the hard part is making sure you are actually leveraging what you have already invested in.