Optimize Blog Content for Sales Results
It’s natural to want to entertain or inform your readers with the best content you can put together. Rather than push a product, the conventional wisdom holds, you want to engage, interact and make the world a better place for your clients.
And you do. You really do want these things. The only problem, of course, is that such lofty ideals aren’t free, and you’re the one stuck with the tab. So, you need to generate some revenue, and your corporate blog is one of the ways you do that.
To get the most out of your blog, however, you need to find that middle ground between pure advertising and pure news/information/education. Essentially, you need blog content that can unobtrusively deliver an engagement opportunity while still delivering value to your target market.
Among the best techniques you can use is to align your blog topics with the products and services you sell … in a 1:1 ratio. This may seem a bit confining, but it’s actually quite effective.
Let’s say you’re selling EMC data de-duplication (among other solutions), and you want to generate some buzz on your capabilities and relationships. Instead of writing a broad blog post on storage virtualization or datacenter efficiency, write one only on data de-dupe – specifically the particular solution you want to highlight. When readers visit your blog (especially when clicking through the links on a newsletter), you’ll know exactly what they are interested in.
Now, consider the alternative: the broad storage virtualization article. Instead of knowing exactly what interests a particular visitor to your blog, you need to spend your early interaction gaining basic information about pain points and solution selection … that you could have just as easily gleaned from your blog.
One solution, one blog post. It’s formulaic, but it will supercharge your marketing efforts and deliver better intelligence to your sales team.
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