For B2B organizations in particular, it’s clear that consistent blogging is an important, if not critical part of a lead generation strategy. As Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, emphatically proclaims in the following video, “it just works”.
The steps for increasing your lead volume are simple (the execution is the difficult part). First, create “remarkable” content. Next, develop compelling calls to action (CTAs) that offer something of value to visitors. A CTA, in turn, should drive a visitor to a landing page that has a form. Finally, nurture your leads via email.
Depending upon your type of sale and your lead volume, you may also want to have your sales team contact leads directly by telephone. If your company sells a high ticket product or service, direct salesperson contact with your leads is likely a necessary part of the sales process.
One of the key components for driving visitors to your company’s blog is, of course, your social media reach. Brian provides some simple math that illustrates how much more traffic can come to your blog over time via, among other things, Retweets.
Flipping the Social Media to Blog Equation
Not all visitors want to fill in a Web form, even in exchange for something of value. Some visitors who do fill in a form will use a freemail address plus a bogus name and phone number, which makes direct contact by a salesperson impossible.
Is there an alternative way to get visitors into your sales funnel — one that leverages social media in the other direction?
As a test, we tried out the following scenario at a B2B business I’m involved with. For a new offer, rather than directing visitors to a landing page, the call to action is to Like a Facebook Page. Clicking the CTA button directs visitors to a custom iFrame Page tab, which reveals the free offer after the visitor Likes the Page. In the case of this specific offer, the approach has worked — visitors go through the process and the number of new Page Likes has accelerated.
Once a visitor has Liked your Facebook Page, they both have access to your branded offer and they can be nurtured through the normal process of consistent Facebook wall posts.
But, can the result of this approach be even more actionable in a B2B selling environment? In some cases, the answer is yes.
You do, of course, immediately see the full name of a person who has Liked your Page. If you click on the link to the person’s profile, depending upon how tight or loose their privacy settings are, you may also see where they live and even where they work. With some simple Google, LinkedIn and/or Jigsaw investigation, you can sometimes find the person’s phone number and/or email address and then provide this information to a salesperson for follow up.
There’s even the option of correlating new Likes with the Web analytics running on your iFrame Page tabs. Your Web stats will display a visitor’s company’s name if the reverse IP lookup reveals a company.
The level of investigation outlined above is mainly a manual process (until someone comes along and automates it) — but for higher ticket sales, it may be worth the time to dig into various sites for information about your visitors.
A Hybrid Call to Action Approach from Your Blog
Another approach might be to offer both Web Form and Facebook Page Like options to a visitor for a given offer. So, a standard landing page could have some added text that reads “Don’t want to fill in a form? – Like our Facebook Page instead to get access to the whitepaper” (or whatever the offer is).
While the traditional landing page with a Web form may well be the best way to capture B2B leads, it could be worth experimenting with the approach of driving blog visitors to a Facebook reveal Page tab for a particular CTA and then analyzing the results.
