“Blogging” can feel like an old-school concept. Isn’t that something people did in 2006? And it can feel disconnected to sales — after all, there are lots of sales blogs and sales LinkedIn/social posts, and most of them sound like bullshit. Wouldn’t you rather focus on a calling/emailing/meeting strategy to get more touches? Sure, sure. That’s important. But if you’re not blogging at all, you’re missing out on a huge lead generation piece. Here’s why.
Relationship and Proof
Before a prospect gets on the phone with sales, they are going to check you out. Usually this means:
- Your website
- Your blog
- Your social profiles
- Any reviews or new articles about you
When they check your website or social, what are you sharing? Hopefully some interesting stuff relative to industry.
A few years ago one of our colleagues was checking out a cloud security company on their site and on LinkedIn. Every single post was promoting basically the same webinar. That company comes off as “don’t know what they’re doing.”
Now, conversely one of their rivals had a blog with lots of cloud topics, network security topics, and general industry overview topics — plus vetted content from that industry shared as well.
Who do you think our friend called back first? Right. The other company build credibility and authority with the stuff they wrote.
Show that you know what the heck you’re doing and talking about. Blogging is a great path to that.
You define the pain points of the space, which helps SDRs and BDRs
A lot of “here’s a pain point” articles are great collateral for BDR/SDR role to send out. And, in fact, a lot of people don’t want to hear from you on the phone. They don’t have the time, or you come off as pushy. So if you get a phone meeting and then can follow up twice with relevant articles, that’s a win.
Now, there is a caveat here. If all your blogs are crappy and they read like sales pitches (brief description of a problem and then an invitation to get a demo for the last half of the blog), people will tune that out.
So if you don’t have a natural copywriter on the staff somewhere, go get one via a platform (Upwork) or referral. It’s important. No one wants to read one-sheeters turned into blogs all day. If the quality is there, though, then it’s good collateral to move someone down the funnel.
Cut through the noise
We live in the attention economy, despite whatever term you want to use for it. You need to get the attention of a prospect for anything else to happen. If they’re not paying attention to you, there’s no chance they will buy from you down the line. It all begins with attention and awareness. Now, how do you get attention? You say different stuff in a different way and make people say “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I didn’t think about that.” Everyone has posts about “10x sales” in such-and-such way. Do a post about the fundamental building blocks and small steps of sales. Those are different, and people don’t discuss them as much. Now you just got someone’s attention. Attention is precious. Once you have that, you can start moving them down the funnel. Blogs are a great way to get that.
Good spot to bring traffic
Cold traffic from social media is often sent to a static website or a landing page. The theory on the former is “It has all your info,” which is true, but it’s not specific enough, and oftentimes home pages are organized poorly, and people (specific buyer personas from specific market segments) can’t find what they need and bounce.
A landing page makes more sense, but oftentimes they’re pushy, things pop up, there’s too much pricing information, etc.
Why not send them to a blog page or a specific blog that is relevant for that particular market segment? It’s your most relevant, newest content (generally speaking). If they like your blog, you can lift them up a level or two into lead magnets (gated content) eventually.
Maybe have an email capture on your blog — but be sure it doesn’t display immediately. It should display after people have had a chance to read half a post or longer. If you consistently bring people value through your blog, those are much-easier converts than some landing page, usually.
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The bottom line
Is blogging the sexiest sales play of all-time? No, not at all. But if you do it right and do it consistently and don’t make every post read like a sales sheet, it’s a great lead generation tactic for you that you can achieve in about 1 hour or so per week, either yourself or via an outsourced copywriter.
