Tired of scraping the bottom of your lead bucket? If you’re finding it difficult to source leads, or if the leads you are getting are not good quality, you may be feeling frustrated. We’ve all been there.
You might not be looking for new leads in your company blog, but it is a likely place to find them. The purpose of blogging is to increase brand awareness, not to generate leads. Right? Not quite. If done correctly, blogs can be an extremely effective tool for generating leads.
What’s more, they can help drive qualified leads. Here are some tips for how to generate leads from your blog.
1. Define Your Ideal Audience
Before you write, figure out who your audience is. This step is critical even though it’s not much fun. Here’s why.
Who you’re writing for impacts what you write. If you are writing a post comparing your tool to a competitor, you can use the same format as we did for Leadfeeder versus VisitorQueue.
Our goal was to target readers who were in the process of researching VisitorQueue.
The first line of the text tells the reader that they are in the right place.
Think about why your target audience would be on the page. What are they trying to accomplish? The user came to the website through a search engine. What was the user’s query? The information from this website will be useful for your writing.
2. Find the Right Topic
After you identify your audience, it will be easier to choose a topic that interests them. Your goal is to find a topic that will be useful to your potential customers, while also prequalifying them to some extent.
The goal is to generate leads for a demo call about an enterprise social media marketing tool. The target audience is marketing directors at the enterprise level.
There are many potential topics you could write about related to social media for businesses. This could include discussing trends in enterprise social media use, new features on Instagram that businesses may find useful, or strategies for optimizing Facebook ads.
You would not write about how to use Tik-Tok to become an influencer because that is not something enterprise clients care about.
Here are a few ways to look for topics that will drive leads not just traffic:
Sales, marketing, and customer service teams should polled to generate a list of questions that customers and prospects ask. These are topics prospects are interested in.
Look at the data from your site’s internal search function. What topics should you address that you haven’t been addressing?
If you want to find ideas for topics to write about, one way you can do this is by researching your top keywords in a tool like WordTracker. Another way to find ideas is by looking at the “Suggestions” for these keywords.
Google trends can be used to find popular search trends and to write about them. Here’s an example for “social media marketing”:
Look for related queries to get a few ideas. The social media marketing plan template is an excellent choice for in-depth marketing strategies. A downloadable guide can be used as a lead magnet to attract new customers. If you still need more ideas, this article by Yoast will help you generate even more.
3. Keep User Intent in Mind
As I’ve said before, user intent is important to consider when developing a website. It’s essential to think about what the user is trying to accomplish when they visit your site, and then design the experience around that. Here’s why:
Your goal isn’t just traffic but also leads. Even though a high search volume may not be helpful when trying to convince readers to give their contact information, it is still a goal for many people.
You need to focus on what their intent is. Let’s go back to the example we talked about in the last section. We have an enterprise social media marketing tool, and we would like to use the “social media marketing plan template” as a blog topic.
What does that topic say about user intent? The user is having difficulty creating or organising their social media plan.
They are trying to get help with their social media marketing plan and our tool is the solution. If you want your blog post to be successful, you need to focus on what the user is looking for. Don’t just create another page that users will quickly leave.
4. Write Your Blog Post
You are aware of your audience, you have a subject, and you keep the user’s intent in thoughts. It’s time to sit down and write your post. The most difficult aspect of this might be the writing, particularly if you don’t have a talent for it.
Start by creating an outline. What main points do you want to cover? What questions might your users have? Start with the main point, and then come back to the introduction later if it’s hard.
If you’re not good at grammar, you can use a tool like Grammarly. The tool not only checks for spelling and grammar errors, but it will also tell you if you are rambling on or using complex language.
The pro version of this tool allows you to set goals for your audience in terms of formality and tone, so that you can use language that they will understand. Grammarly is not always accurate, it might make some wrong suggestions, but it works well as a second opinion.
5. Include Relevant CTAs
What action do you want your readers to take after reading your post? What you ideally want is one main call-to-action, such as signing up for a webinar, reading an ebook you wrote, or scheduling a demo.
Be sure to include other calls to action throughout the post that are relevant. Our goal in our lead generation guide was to increase sign-ups for our tool. The CTA is included several times throughout the post.
We also include links to other blog posts about lead generation in our lead gen guide so you can learn more about the topic!
You shouldn’t only have one call-to-action (CTA) in your blog post expecting it to do all the work. You should have CTAs placed throughout your post that are relevant to capturing leads and keeping readers on your site.
6. Grab Those Leads
Although reading your post is a good start, you need to do something else to ensure that these readers turn into leads.
There are a few options available that will depend on your audience, industry, and what type of information you want to gather. The right option for you will be determined by these factors.
If you want to attract low-cost customers, getting their email address might be a good strategy. You can then nurture the relationship by sending emails. An enterprise SaaS company might want to schedule demo calls in order to speak with potential customers and show them the product.
Don’t make your offer too complicated or time-consuming for the reader–most people won’t answer 15 questions to download a simple spreadsheet, but they might for a free two-week trial.
Offer a Downloadable Resource
One way to turn a blog post into a lead generation tool is to offer a downloadable resource, such as an e-book, in exchange for an email address. While writing this post, I was browsing HubSpot looking for pages to link to and spotted this downloadable resource on a blog post:
The subject matter experts saw that I was passionate about the topic, so they gave me a more comprehensive guide. Use the download process to help qualify leads, but only ask for the information you need.
Don’t ask users to answer a lot of questions just to get a short guide.
Use Time-Delayed Pop-Ups
Popups are small, annoying boxes that interrupt what you’re reading and ask for your email address. They are annoying and can be terrible for UX. But they work when you use them correctly.
Sleeknote found that popups that display after 8 seconds convert better than popups that display sooner or later.
Make sure to use a time-delay feature on your test popups so you can be sure users are interested in your post before you try to convert them.
Offer a Free Trial
If you’re looking for a way to generate leads, free trials are a great option, especially for software as a service (SaaS) products. You can get more users for your tool by simply offering them the chance to try it in exchange for their email address.
Make sure you take care of them and show them what you can do during the trial period so they understand your worth!
7. Try the “Hello Bar”
If you’ve ever visited a website with a bar across the top of its page that looks like this:
If you’ve come across a blog that has a pop-up asking you to sign up for a newsletter or something similar, then you’ve seen one of the most popular ways to generate leads from a blog today.
The Hello Bar is a narrow strip that spans your page and includes a call to action (CTA) to help you drive traffic to post-click landing pages or squeeze pages without being too intrusive. If users aren’t interested in your blog post right away, they will still see it as they scroll down the page.
The Hello Bar can be a powerful lead generation tool. Use it to drive targeted traffic to your website so you can build your email list like Derek Halpern did. He used it to gain 1,180 email subscribers in 30 days.
8. Offer Your Readers Exclusive Content
Even though you are giving people free advice on how to improve their business, you can still charge people who want more in-depth information.
Your readers will be more engaged with your blog if you offer them exclusive content that they can’t get anywhere else.
Facebook marketer Jon Loomer has a blog called “Power Hitters Club” which expands on concepts that he mentions in his regular posts.
The best way to get people to sign up for your exclusive content is to provide value in your regular blog posts. Go even further in depth with your exclusive content to really hook your readers.
On Jon’s blog, you can find great insights, but if you want more detailed information, you can attend one of his live workshops. These workshops are 90 minutes long and cover the topics found on his blog.
9. Offer Your Readers Perks
If you own an ecommerce website, a great way to generate leads is by offering your blog readers a chance to buy products at a discounted rate.
The Gap gives away discounts to those that subscribe to their email newsletter, and takes it a step further by offering to send deals via text message so that you “never miss a thing.” Those “things” include deals, styles and more:
10. Try a Welcome Redirect
If your content is valuable to all readers, you can use a “welcome redirect.”
The WordPress plugin LeadPages will allow you to create a lead capture page which visitors will be directed to before they reach your blog.
This tactic is more assertive than the others we have talked about. This can be annoying to your blog’s visitors. You should always test your changes to see if they are actually improving your conversion rate rather than making it worse.
11. Blog Summary Downloads
At Instapage, we like to fill our blog posts with content. It is beneficial to include images, examples, and case studies that support the claims made throughout the text.
This text is saying that sometimes readers find it difficult to understand a text if it is too long. Some people may not have the time to read a blog post that is over 2,000 words long. And we get that.
If you want people to read your entire blog post, you can offer shorter, downloadable summaries in exchange for a name and email. This way, people can get the key takeaways without having to read the entire blog post.
Here is an example what you could offer as a PDF download for a blog article on things that are hurting your conversion rate:
The two primary causes of a decline in conversion rates are lack of understanding and carelessness. We’re going to show you some problems that could be on your post-click landing page that you might not know about.
You are the only one who can avoid the 6 following conversions killers to solve the second problem. The success of your entire campaign depends on it. Here’s what you could be doing wrong:
- You’re using your homepage as a post-click landing page
- Your form is too long
- You’re not using a custom URL
- You’ve included too many calls to action
- You’ve left the navigation bar at the top of your page
- Your CTA button colors are all wrong
It’s not too late to save your conversion rate!
The following tips will help you customize your post-click landing pages without IT, so you can bring your conversion rates back up.
The above summary is shorter than the full blog post by about 1,344 words. Can you see how a blog article summary could be a helpful lead generation tool?
12. Leverage Margin Banners
Margin banners are commonplace on nearly every blog. You’ll usually see a CTA on the right sidebar asking you to download content or sign up for an email list.
On the Instapage blog, we include a CTA that encourages people to try out our professional post-click landing page templates.
Above this blog post, to the right, is a picture. We also test 12 different images of this banner to determine which design converts the best.
13. Reach Out to Influencers
So far, we’ve mostly focused on passive ways to turn your blog into a lead generation machine. This one will take a little more work from you.
You’ll need to identify influencers in your industry. You should search social networks for accounts that have a lot of followers and that those followers are engaging with the account.
To effectively engage your employees, you will need to put forth the effort. Make sure to engage with the content your favorite brands are putting out there. Show your support by liking their content on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, and commenting on their blog posts.
The most important thing is to make sure they can recognize you. This results in more business for you. The more often people see your logo or photo, the more familiar they become with you, which results in more business.
You will need to reach out to them in a way that no one else is in order to be successful. People who have a large following on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are constantly bombarded with requests from brands to promote their products or services.
Influencers can make a lot of money by agreeing to do this, but it requires a significant time commitment. If you want people to respond positively to you, keep your tone friendly and relatable.
If you want to learn more about how to connect with people who can help promote your business, Groove has a good post about it. They explain how they were able to get over 1,000 new subscribers in just one day using this method.
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