Build a Social Media Marketing Blog for Investors

If you think about the ways people find your company it will become very clear that blogging can provide a effective strategy to increase traffic and investor awareness. Learn How to Build a Social Media Marketing Blog for Investors.

Are you using your blog for business?

Wondering how to combine blog posts with social media content to increase shareholder awareness?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use blog posts to create social media content at every stage of your marketing funnel.

#1: Define Your Marketing Goal

At OTC PR Group we know that creating a social media marketing funnel is directly tied to your marketing goals. To begin, think of one marketing goal you want to accomplish. Beginning with a single short-term goal is much easier than tackling long-term goals. Also, choose a realistic, measurable goal so you can identify whether you’ve reached it.

Here are a few examples of goals that would make a great starting point for a social media marketing funnel:

• If you’re launching a new business or acquisition, aim for a specific number of blog posts describing new business and the positive aspects of that sector.
• If you’re reaching out to new investors, focus on making a certain number of press or company updates for your first quarter of business.
• If you want to grow your email subscriber list, concentrate on increasing your rate of new subscribers from 8% per week to 10% per week.

#2: Publish Six Blog Posts to Create a Funnel to Support the Stake Holder Journey

After you identify your goal, you want to ensure you publish content that leads people toward that goal. To do that effectively, your content must cater to people at different stages in the funnel. For each stage, write two blog posts that support your goal at each stage: awareness, trust, and conversion.

Stage 1: Blog Posts That Create Awareness

To create awareness, think about blog posts that would attract new people to your brand and demonstrate what you can offer. Also, if your blog posts give people a quick-fix solution to a problem, you’ll earn enough trust for them to hang around and learn more.

In this first stage of the exposure process, these types of blog posts work well:

• Top resources post: Share your best resources with your audience.
• Product and guides: Share about and rank products and/or services that suit a specific purpose.
• How-to posts: Present a problem and demonstrate a solution (or many solutions) to that problem.
• Question-and-answer posts: Write a post in Q&A format to answer your readers’ burning questions about a product.

Stage 2: Your Prospect Wants to Know, Like, and Trust You

At this stage, the word “want” is important. Marketers often assume that loyalty is hard-won. However, when you help people, they naturally want to like and trust you. Your prospect becomes eager to learn more and figure out if you can help. The higher the price tag, the more content you’ll need at this stage.

Here are five blog post types that work well for building trust, like-ability, and loyalty:

• Customer case studies: Share a customer’s experience to show readers how your business helped that customer.
• Expert interviews: You might ask an expert to give insight into an issue that’s relevant to your readers.
• Inspirational and motivational stories: Tell a personal story to motivate and inspire your readers.
• Opinion pieces: Persuade readers to consider an alternative point of view by challenging conventional wisdom on an issue.
• Research breakdown: Analyze the takeaways from several current surveys or studies about a trend in your industry. Or summarize an industry report to help your readers understand how the information may affect them.

Stage 3: Your Prospects Are Warm and Ready to Take the Relationship Further

Conversion doesn’t necessarily mean asking for the sale. To illustrate, you might ask the reader to subscribe to your email newsletter so you can nurture the sale via email. However, it’s a myth that blog posts should never contain sales information.

When you’re in business, you’re supposed to ask for the sale. It’s absolutely okay and necessary for you to tell your potential customers how you can help them and why they should buy from you. Focus on attracting and nurturing relationships 80% of the time, but you can focus on conversions with the other 20%.

Here are three types of blog posts that work well for conversions:

• Call the reader to action: Run a challenge that motivates your readers to take action. You can organize a formal challenge where readers must sign up to participate or an informal challenge designed to foster a sense of community.
• Invite the reader to enter a competition/giveaway: Promote a product or service by enticing readers to enter a competition by writing no more than 25 words about a given topic.
• Launch a new product or service: Write a blog post announcing a new product and explain how the product helps your customers.

#3: Re-purpose Published Blog Posts to Create Social Media Marketing Collateral

After your six blog posts are published, break your posts down into smaller chunks you can use on social media. Create graphics, videos, and so on to support each piece of content as you roll it out.

Because you’ve started with blog posts, you can easily re-purpose the content in other formats for use on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels.

From content in each example blog post, you can create social media content chunks such as the following:

• Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup: Behind-the-scenes video, inspirational quote graphics
• Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge: Lead generation ad with downloadable document, live video Q&A for each day of the challenge, Facebook group for challenge participants
• Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun: Conversion ad with a call to action to purchase, recorded video that demonstrates the product, infographic that shows the product’s value

Conclusion

When you build a social media marketing funnel that supports a goal, you create more targeted and relevant content on both your blog and social media. Also, you can easily re-purpose your blog posts for your social media marketing.

Remember to create content for each stage of the shareholder journey and adjust how much content you post based on your knowledge of your product and audience.

This demonstrates the scalability of business blogging. While you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment — the work to generate that traffic and those leads is already done. There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, they also become great outlets through with marketers can communicate other PR-type important information — things like product releases or event information and press releases. It’s certainly easier to get attention for more company-focused initiatives if you’ve built up your own audience on your own WEBSITE, as opposed to pitching your story to journalists and hoping one of them bites. These are all great side effects or uses of a business blog that must be implemented to ensure an effective marketing and shareholder outreach campaign.

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These services have proven to help create and maintain strong relationships with a corporation’s investor base, resulting in strong valuations in the marketplace and the establishment of leadership positions for our clients.

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Business Blogging Benefits

The amazing Business Blogging Benefits!

If you think about the ways people find your website it will become very clear that blogging can provide a effective strategy to increase traffic. The following methods also drive traffic but lets consider how they stack up:

People can type your name right in to their browser, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic on top of what you’re already getting.

You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (not recommended), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive and, you know. Not legal.

You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn’t illegal, but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So, how can you drive traffic? In short: blogging, social media and search engines. Here’s how it functions. Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not that many, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right? Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems. Every time you write a blog post, that’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search. That’s one more ping to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content will surface.

Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share via — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet. Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going and your blog can serve as that repository of content. You’re strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels. So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.

Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.

Just like every blog post you write it is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to create new leads. The way this works is really simple: Just add a lead generating call-to-action to every blog post. Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials … basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information. That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads for your company.

The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals. Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their company? “Establishing authority” is an important metric. Because at the end of the day, that’s what many of your blog posts are. Think about the sales enablement opportunities blogging presents:

• If prospects find answers to their common questions via blog posts written by people at your company, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past — even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
• Prospects that have been reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer. That makes for a far more productive sales conversation than one held between two relative strangers.
• Salespeople who encounter specific questions that require in-depth explanation or a documented answer can pull from an archive of blog posts. Not only do these blog posts help move the sales process along more swiftly than if a sales rep had to create the assets from scratch, but the salesperson is further positioned as a helpful resource to their prospect.

Blogging does — largely through search engines help you drive site traffic and generate new leads. If you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let’s say that blog post gets you 75 views and 7 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you’ve netted 150 views and 12 leads.

It’s not over. Business Blogging Benefits

That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post. So while it may feel like day one or bust, in reality, blogging acts more like this:

The effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future. In fact, about 70% of the traffic each month on most blogs comes from posts that weren’t published in the current month. They come from old posts. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month — about 90% of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts that were published in previous months. Sometimes years later.

This demonstrates the scalability of business blogging. While you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment — the work to generate that traffic and those leads is already done. There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, they also become great outlets through with marketers can communicate other PR-type important information — things like product releases or event information and press releases. It’s certainly easier to get attention for more company-focused initiatives if you’ve built up your own audience on your own WEBSITE, as opposed to pitching your story to journalists and hoping one of them bites. These are all great side effects or uses of a business blog that must be implemented to ensure an effective marketing campaign.

OTC PR Group is an investor relations firm specializing in comprehensive programs for micro-cap, small-cap and mid-cap public companies increase stock visibility in a range of industries. We combine knowledge of capital markets communications, and an unparalleled reputation for integrity and client service with evolving industry best practices to design and execute investor relations programs that help deliver long-term shareholder value.