You’ve got anecdotes, case studies, Top Ten Lists, provocative insights and more on your corporate or organizational blog. Hat’s off to you. That’s a huge achievement, particularly if you’ve been publishing a blog for a year or more. But what is your CTA (Call to Action)? And by that I mean, what step is a visitor prompted to take after landing on your blog.
BTW notice that I said “landing on.” One of the myths of corporate blogging is that you are cultivating repeat, loyal readers. Just ‘aint so and for a number of reasons. One is that your corporate blog may be, er, boring. Frankly, a continuous string of provocative insights is a tall order if you’re not a paid columnist for the New York Times. More importantly, according to a study by Compendium*, the majority of traffic to business blogs comes from first-time visitors, as much as 80 percent in fact.
Back to your Call to Action. What I mean is what obvious callouts do you have to attract a visitor’s eye after she reads your latest blog post? Think about it. Your blog reader, if a first-time visitor, has most likely typed in a keyword phrase and ended up on your blog through search results. He or she may not even know that it’s a blog. So you’ve got her attention, at least for a few seconds. This is your real-time moment to prompt your visitor to take the next step. If I sound all salesy here I don’t mean to. This is Permission Marketing 101. It’s offering something unanticipated but relevant at the exact moment your visitor is looking for it.
A few ideas for persuasive Calls to Action
– Download our white paper
– Join us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
– Ask us a question
– Download our e-book
– Sign up for our free Webinar
– Request our toolkit
– Sign up for our e-newsletter
– Request a demo
Intelliresponse‘s blog sidebar, above, offers several of these. If you can make your call-to-action buttons even more prominent (green or yellow with a drop shadow and beveled edge, for example) so much the better. I’m looking at my own blog as I write this and realize I could do a much better job myself with calls to action. What else can you think of?
* Full disclosure: I am a strategic advisor to Compendium. Intelliresponse uses Compendium for its enterprise blog platform, as does Driver Solutions which features the green Apply Now button. According to the stat-minded folks at Compendium, Driver Solutions is attributing $20,150 in revenue from their blog.
Here’s how they compute that: thirty percent of the people who get to the online application page (to learn how to drive a commercial vehicle) actually complete the form. Of the completed forms, 11 percent turn into a student. If an average student is worth $3,100 and approximately 6.5 students came in through the blog, that totals $20,150. There is a cost of approximately $10,000 a year to use Compendium’s blog platform. So the ROI on Driver Solutions’ blogging is 200 percent.