Last week’s webinar, which we co-hosted with Heinz Marketing, focused on how to convert content into leads and sales. For many professional services firms today, it’s an increasingly pressing question, and the answers are shaped by recent findings about the professional services marketplace:
- High growth firms reported focusing more on blogging than any other marketing technique.
- Blogging is ranked second for effectiveness by high growth firms, coming in behind search engine optimization. Since blogging is a key component of SEO, this ranking only further serves to emphasize its importance.
- Over 80% of buyers reported that they check out a professional service provider’s website when making a purchasing decision. 63% of buyers search online. Both of these statistics illustrate the importance of a well-informed website and strong SEO.
- Blogging increases visibility and helps to establish a firm’s reputation and brand.
As it happens, Heinz Marketing provides a clear example of these realities in action. Let's take a look.
Heinz Marketing: Content Conversion in Action
Since its founding five years ago, Heinz Marketing has undergone tremendous growth. Their early beginnings saw sporadic blog posts and a modest 1,200 visitors per month. Today, Heinz publishes posts every day and averages 24,000 visitors per month. This growth is largely attributed to its blog, which generates between 300 and 500 leads a month.
Heinz sums up their blogging strategy in five questions:
- What/who are your targets?
- What do they care about? What outcome are they seeking?
- Where do you find them?
- What or who influences them?
- How do they want to engage and (eventually) buy?
The bottom line? The content you create for your blog should be about your audience, not about your firm. What’s more, the strategy supporting your content is just as important as the content itself.
The Heinz blog is a compelling example of a high-performance website, using content offers to help visitors find more content that is relevant to them. In our webinar, Matt Heinz shares tips on how the firm uses analytics to assess which topics connect with visitors best – and convert most effectively. Simply hitting “publish” doesn’t make the most of the opportunity blogging presents.
Staying current
When you’re considering your site’s lead generation and conversion capacity, another key factor to remember is currency. Is it up-to-date with web design trends and the needs of your audience? If not, it may be time for a blog refresh.
Web design conventions tend to undergo significant changes every two or three years. Your blog is really your firm’s public face online, and if it looks notably outdated, your firm will look outdated too. This isn’t just about aesthetics either. Core site functionality progresses quickly online, with near-constant innovations. And today it is possible to create, for example, sophisticated mobile experiences that weren’t possible or practical only a few years ago.
So in order to support a contemporary brand image and give audiences the best possible experience, it's important to stay up to date. It’s also important to keep an eye on your audience’s needs – are they demanding more content than your current blog can support? Are they seeking out rich content like highly integrated video?
Blogging is about providing your audience with the resources they need. And when this ethos drives your content marketing, you can see the same kind of success enjoyed by Heinz. To get more blogging tips from Heinz and Hinge, listen to the webinar in full or download the slides here.
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For more information on using content marketing for different stages of the sales cycle, check out our free Content Marketing Guide for Professional Services.
