How firms are using blogs to develop a steady stream of quality sales leads, month after month

Most leads generated from corporate blogs each month come from old blog posts.  This archive of blogs helps firms to build a regular, consistent level of sales leads that are of high quality and very cost effective.  Businesses new to blogging just have to invest in building up their library of blog material in order to achieve the same benefits.

The corporate blog is having a transformational impact on the lead generation process of many companies.  Research has already shown that sales leads from blogs and social media are 60% cheaper to generate than those from sources like telemarketing and trade shows.

Evidence now exists suggesting that corporate blogs can be very effective in providing a consistent level of high quality leads over a prolonged period of time.  A sample of blog-using organisations has revealed some impressive observations:

This presents firms with a tremendous opportunity to transform their lead generation process for the better.  By investing in good quality content that’s relevant to your audience, you can start to even out the peaks and troughs in lead generation that are so often experienced by sales teams across the country.  Furthermore, this steady stream of leads can be produced at half the cost than has traditionally been the case. 

Generating leads from blogs takes time.  You need to start today

With the bulk of blog leads coming from old posts, it’s important to build up a library of blog material.  Clearly, this takes time and money.  It has been estimated that it takes, on average, three hours to write a single blog post, so you need to have the resources available to devote to blog creation.  If your existing headcount doesn’t have the bandwidth or skill set required, consider outsourcing the task to an external copywriter.

Make sure you create blog posts that are of high quality, and relevant to your customers.  This is not the place for your sales pitch.  Instead, you should inform how products and services like yours solve problems.  Additionally, you could comment on the implications of a new item of industry news, or perhaps illustrate how your customer could save money or improve efficiency by following certain guidelines or actions.

You could use your existing marketing content as the basis for creating blog posts.  By writing a post that focuses on one of the benefits of a product, you can then include a link within the post that goes to your website where your sales brochure can be downloaded.  That’s how your web traffic can increase.  If you have created your landing pages appropriately, you’ll also be able to drive visitors to other pages on your site and ask for readers to follow you on Twitter and other social media platforms.

It’s this interconnected capability of digital media like blogging, social media and the web, that’s transforming lead generation strategies.  New digital channels like these are moving away from being seen as experimental.  Indeed, for many industries, digital lead generation techniques are now viewed as mainstream.  

For firms yet to fully embrace corporate blogging, the key is to start building up that archive of blog material as soon as possible.  Then start promoting on your website as well as on Twitter and social media platforms.  Collectively, as your library of blog posts increases, you should see a corresponding increase in the volume of quality sales leads, month after month.

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Freelance copywriting and blog ghost writing for SMEs