Introduction – How to drive the right kind of traffic to your website

B2B companies typically spend significant amounts of money setting up a website they are proud to make their online business card. But consider this – who is ending up on the homepage of your website and at what stage of their decision process? I’ll venture a guess that those are prospects who are looking for a specific solution and are now trying to decide between vendors and figure out which can best help them achieve what they are seeking. But what happened before they landed on your “online sales pitch”? Research indicates that 57% of the purchase decision is complete before a prospect even contacts the supplier. Your prospects are doing research online well before you hear from them. If you’d like to drive the right kind of traffic to your website, get in front of your prospects earlier in their decision process. The secret is to make your business blog the front door to your site. This post will walk you through how to do just that.

Good bye PC – don’t try to “win” everyone, tailor your content to screen irrelevant visitors and focus on your buyer personas

The fact that your friends or family don’t necessarily understand the terminology in your website and blog, only means you’re doing something wrong if they’re your target audience.

No matter what your company does, you’re not selling to everyone. Make sure you have a crystal-clear idea of who your buyer personas are.

• What is their job?
• What are they responsible for?
• What are their main challenges?
• What are their goals?
• Where do they go to for information?
• How do they make decisions?

Take time to research this. Speak with your current customers, speak with your sales team, visit forums and groups they are part of. Now forget everyone else and focus only on them.

Stop selling start educating 

Once you have a fair idea of who your prospects are and what their challenges are, put yourself in their shoes. Instead of focusing on your company and how your product or service is the best things that ever happened to them (save that for the backdoor i.e. your website). Fruitful B2B relationship require trust – focus on adding value. Position yourself as a professional, teach, help, and please don’t try to sell right from the start. Align your content with the active research process your prospects go through leading up to a purchase also known as the buyer’s journey.

There are three stages to a typical buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness – the prospect realized and expressed symptoms of a potential problem. For example “how do I drive the right kind of traffic to my website”
2. Consideration – the prospect clearly defined and gave a name to their problem and is now committed to researching and understanding all available approaches to solving their problem. For example, a prospect who’s problem is driving the right kind of traffic might research “how to do Inbound Marketing” or “what you should look out for when outsourcing Inbound Marketing”
3. Decision – the prospect defined their solution strategy and is now comparing vendors, reading case studies and is ready to buy. This is the stage to be selling. This is where your website enters the stage. Create blog posts that educate “why you” and link that content to your website.

Include keywords in your blog post titles

It’s not enough to create great content, you need to make sure your prospects will find it when searching for solutions. Try including some keywords in your blog post titles, this will help your posts get properly indexed by search engines and you’ll start showing up in more searches. The secret is to include “long tail keywords” that have high search volumes and relatively low competition.

Use the Google keyword planner and create a table such as this:

Pro tip: find relevant long tail keywords, include them in your title but remember to write for people not for search engines. Use tools such us Answerthepublic or Portent to come up with attention grabbing titles that will make you stand out among others who are also competing for the same keywords. 

Include calls to actions at the end of every blog post 

I see many companies doing a great job blogging, yet their conversion rates aren’t as high as they’d like. If you’re going to remember one things out of this post make it this – by simply including a call to action at the end of every post you will begin to convert more leads at an earlier point in their buying process (it’s also a good idea to include an image CTAs within the post such as the one above)

These calls to action should invite them to learn more about what they had just read. Here are ideas of content types you can prepare and invite them to read in exchange to their credentials:

Use your blog to nurture your leads

You can shorten your sales cycle by nurturing your leads. Do this by helping them down the buyer’s journey in accordance with the content they have downloaded from you. For example, if a prospect read an awareness stage blog post and downloaded an eBook, email them and invite them to read a consideration stage post.

Nurturing leads can also encourage your sales team to become more educational and consultative in nature as they will encounter leads earlier in the buying process. Instead of marketing blaming sales for doing a crappy job selling, and sales blaming marketing for generating irrelevant leads, sales and marketing teams can actually get along and collaborate. Once the buyer’s journey is clear and everybody is speaking the same language, you can align goals and work together to accomplish them.

Conclusion

By making your blog the front door to your website, you can get in front of prospects earlier in their decision process, help them, build trust, convert leads and shorten your sales cycle.

Make sure to understand who your ideal prospects are, what they need, and help them down the buyer’s journey leading to choosing you. Your website should be the place they visit once they are considering working with you. Make sure they enter it when the time is right and not before that.

If you found this useful, it might interest you to learn how to leverage your marketing efforts by implementing and inbound marketing strategy. Download our How to create an effective Inbound Marketing strategy guide and learn all about it. Get your FREE copy ==>

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