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
Creating the Right Amount of Content for Your Prospects
Depending on your product, prospects may take their time to make a purchase, especially if what you’re selling is at a higher price point. In that case, it helps to allow a longer lead time in your marketing campaigns. Your audience’s tolerance for information frequency will determine your lead time.
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.
We Deliver Your Message
We will become your “total” Public Relations firm. As a result of our extensive experience with particular client’s needs, we’ve developed programs that meet your specific goals.
Our program affords you the greatest coverage in developing stock support and higher market capitalization utilizing the largest and most popular database providers in the industry who can take positions in your company stock.
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.
Let us help bring your company to the forefront of the investment community.
For more information on our services contact us today at 561-807-6350
Email: corp@otcprgroup.com