In your sales and marketing strategy, your Web site or blog should serve as the nucleus for the social media platforms. The objective is that the different channels will attract potential customers to your Web site or blog, providing you with the opportunities to present your services that result in prospects calling you and ultimately buying your products.
If you don’t have a blog, you should start one. Posting articles will go a long way in helping you in establishing your reputation as an industry authority. This is important because prospects only want to buy from sources that they trust.
The goal of your blog should be is attract traffic by providing the visitor with value in the form of content that they can use. This should be relevant information that answers questions or solves problems for your target market. That way, when the potential buyer is actually looking for commercial graphics, they will call you as a potential supplier and problem solver.
How you present your content is also important. Your stories not only should be relevant and interesting, but the words that you select to use matter. Here’s why. The search engines continually scan your content for the keywords that readers use in searches. In writing your posts, you should use keywords repeatedly in your content that rank high with the search engines. (The way to discover which keyword combinations work best is use a keyword research tool, such as Google Adwords.)
Writing a Blog Post
As important as the written word is in constructing your blog post, your visuals are just as important, especially since sign makers and digital printers are in the visual communication business. Good photography of your projects—as well as graphs and videos—support the written content and make blogs much more interesting and unique.
In writing a blog post, here are nine tips that can make your stories more interesting and will help build site traffic:
#1. Limit your blog posts to a single unique and interesting topic. For example, “Five Surprising Facts About Vehicle Wraps.” Your posts don’t need to be long. In fact, it is better that you limit their length to 500 to 1,000 words. Better yet, give the readers just enough information, leaving them wanting to know more so that they will contact you. This is similar to the cliffhanger technique that television writers use at the end of a program so the viewer tunes in for the next episode.
# 2. Four out of five people never read past most headlines. That’s why it is so important that you make your headlines enticing, so they arouse the reader’s curiosity and he wants to read on. The headline ideally should be no longer than six words and limited to fewer than sixty characters. Example: “7 Fundamental Rules When Buying Signage.”
#3. Before you post a story, check it for any grammatical or spelling errors. Then have your spouse or a friend proofread it. A well-written article will help project a professional image.
# 4. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Avoid industry jargon. Tell your story as if you were explaining the topic to your mother. Keep your sentences short and sweet. And keep the tone of your writing conversational.
#5. If you make a claim in your blog post or on your Web site or even in a brochure, back that claim with evidence. You can produce evidence in a number of different forms. It can be in the form of statistics from a study. Or you can use a testimonial from a satisfied customer as well as before and after photography of the project.
#6. An effective format for writing a blog post is to present a problem that your target market might be facing or can relate to and then solve it. In a way, that’s really how you should present your business. The customer really doesn’t care about you or your machinery or the cool things that you can make with these machines; instead they care about solutions to their problems.
# 7. Never forget that the goal of your blog is to generate sales leads. At the end of the blog, make sure that you include a call for action. What does that mean? If you are writing a story about “Floor Graphics that Accelerate Sales Traffic,” tell the reader, if they want to know more about effective graphics programs, to call you today.
#8. Continually developing interesting and informative content is demanding. When you don’t have time to create something entirely new, there is nothing wrong with recycling a past blog post rewritten from a different angle.
#9. Once you create content for your blog, try adapting it to another platform such as YouTube. Repurposing the content on a number of platforms ensures that your message gets through to your target audience.
Promoting Your Blog
Social media is a great way to promote your blog and Web site. After you start posting stories, your next task is to drive traffic to your blog. Here are fou effective ways to promote your blog:
- Promote your blog posts as well as your Web site in an e-mail marketing newsletter. E-mail marketing is also regarded by many as the most effective ways today to generate sales leads. Services such as Constant Contact are very cost effective in delivering your message.
- Use Twitter to link to your blog articles.
- Link your LinkedIn account to your blog as well as to your Web site and post articles with teaser copy that links to your blog.
- Post links to your blog articles on your Facebook page and on Pinterest.
