The Essential How To Guide on Generating Leads with Business Blogging – Part 3

Blogging can be fun when you write about your passions. But blogging for business is more about generating leads from your content and turning them into sales. It’s the serious tip of the the art of blogging.

Business blogging needs robust processes, tools and frameworks

In the previous part of the series “The Essential How To Guide on Generating Leads with Business Blogging ”, we outlined how to create a framework for lead generating blogging.

Besides setting up goals and visualizing them in a funnel, you need to complete the circle with more insightful information about the target audience. Once you start writing on your company’s blog according to the keyword research and the editorial calendar, you’ll want to start using surveys to validate your hypotheses and optimize the efforts.

You need to ask “why?”

Since Google Analytics (or other web analytics software that you’re using) is just showing you through quantitative data what is happening on the website, you may want to figure out the cause of the results. “Why is this happening on my website?” is the question that needs an answer in the early stages of lead generation.

In order to avoid leakages in your content marketing campaigns, you need to know as much as possible about the users that interact with the website. The ultimate goal of using surveys is making sure that you optimize any future campaign. It requires:

• Converting more from the website’s traffic

• Allocating resources efficiently: time, money and energy

Optimization is a growth factor that involves targeted efforts. The focus should go only on the suitable users for the business, the good traffic as I’ve explained in the previous parts of this guide. You need to know which segments of traffic generate the greatest revenue for your business.

The big picture

Going back to the initial scheme, you can see that one of the intermediate goals is transforming visitors into subscribers.

At the moment, you may find yourself in one of the two following positions:

1. You have created a free offer using the evergreen content (i.e.: evergreen content is the content that remains up to date and can be used in another form)

2. You have not created yet a free offer, but it’s in your plan

In any case, you have to use surveys to know what to do next to achieve your objectives. The four essential outcomes from surveys are:

1. The users’ intent and their specific problems or opportunities

2. The biggest thing they’re struggling with right now

3. The level of satisfaction with the company’s offer

4. The barriers that stop them from converting into customers/ subscribers/ leads

There are no exact rules or questions that you need to use in your surveys to find the answers to these questions. Once you started creating 2-3 surveys on both the website and blog, you’ll observe certain patterns. Use these patterns to get as much information as possible from the users.

To cut a few corners, here are a few suggestions to start using surveys to generate leads based on the four outcomes mentioned above:

#1. The users’ intent and their specific problems or opportunities

There are two alternatives to get actionable insights for lead generation campaigns using information about the user’s intent:

1. Follow-up email survey
2. On-site survey

I suggest you to use the on-site surveys instead of the email. Usually, the users who didn’t convert on the website are frustrated or confused and are not willing to answer to your question. On the other hand, the on-site survey catches them in action. This answer will be fresh and accurate.

Setting up a survey to figure the user’s intent takes 3-5 minutes. With the right software, you just have to choose a template, type the questions, select the pages and traffic segments included in the survey and schedule it.

 

A few technical details and recommendations:

• Segments of traffic: New visitors who viewed three pages

• Pages: Homepage, features

• When to trigger the survey: At load (when the page is loading)

• Keep it simple and focus on your goal: A one-question survey is enough.

Finding out the user’s intent also helps with validating the quality of the website’s traffic. It may not be your offer that is not suitable for the visitors, but the visitors who don’t fit within your target market segment.

#2. The biggest thing they’re struggling with right now

If you want to create that free offer to start growing the email list, you want to write it for the users’ needs. Therefore, you need to know what they need in order to avoid writing an ebook for a problem that doesn’t affect none or too few of the users in your target audience.

You could use the email survey or the on-site survey.

Email survey tips:

• Send a plain text email to the subscriber asking a simple question: “What’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with regarding [your topic]?”. Insert a Call To Action and send traffic to a dedicated page where people can answer.

• Send a follow up email to thank them for answering to your question

• Let them know that you’re working on a product to help them solve their problem

On-site survey:

• Be sure that you have enough traffic to collect answers on-site. Otherwise, it won’t be relevant.

• Write an introductive copy for the survey, like we did in this example:

#3. The level of satisfaction with the company’s offer

This type of information is provided by customers, (the ones who have converted). They are the only ones that could provide with information about what they liked, what mattered to them, what comparisons and research they did before deciding to convert.

The information regarding the customers’ satisfaction helps with observing patterns and behavior and starting to replicate success.

#4. The barriers that stop them from converting into customers/ subscribers/ leads

Technical details and recommendations:

• Use exit intent technology to trigger the survey at exit.

• Keep it simple(again): one question is enough

• Use it with confidence on all the important landing pages

• Prioritize the website’s pages based on potential, importance and ease

• Use the survey’s answers to optimize the landing pages and improve the offers

If, for instance, you have created a landing page where people can download a free offer, you need to use two methods:

1. A/B testing to test the copy and design (quantitative data)

2. Exit survey to see what is missing on the page. The aim is convincing people to leave their email address for the offer

 

These being said, I hope that you have gathered useful knowledge from this article. I would be happy to answer any questions regarding the uses of surveys to prepare and optimize your future lead generation campaigns.

If you want to read the rest of the series from the beginning, here is part one and part two of “The Essential How To Guide on Generating Leads with Business Blogging”

Note: All of the examples above are created with Marketizator, conversion rate optimization tool for marketers who don’t want to mess with the code. If you want to see the various uses of surveys to achieve your marketing goals, check out this post from Marketizator’s Blog.

Author: Elena Dobre is learning about digital marketing, business and life at Marketizator.com, the complete conversion rate optimization tool. She plays the role of the content strategist, but she’s also experiencing with CRO and lead generation.  She enjoys discovering new online tools, hacks, brilliant minds and beautiful souls. Follow her on Twitter @HDobre.

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