How to Build a Blog That Captures Leads [Customer Story]

How to Build a More Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Step 1. Create Valuable Content for Readers

You probably are already familiar with the need to create a form of valuable content if you hope to execute an effective inbound marketing strategy. HubSpot has already written about this extensively, check out their content creation guide if you’re just getting started.

Visitors to the Bizzabo blog are primarily in the event planning industry, so we try to produce content that event organizers will find helpful. To this end, we pay attention to what’s popular on forums trafficked by organizers and try to provide answers to questions organizers are asking.

For example, on Quora, many event organizers asked other Quora users about event management software.

To create valuable content for your target audience, you must listen to your readers. In this instance, we visited sites like Quora, Reddit, and LinkedIn communities to take the pulse of our potential customers.

In other instances, we engage with our audience on Twitter, or sent blog subscribers a survey, asking them about the sort of content they are most interested in reading.

Step 2. Create Content On A Consistent Basis

After analyzing our blog traffic, we concluded that if we publish new, high-quality content frequently, we'd be able to increase our monthly visits. Many will likely agree that the challenge with content marketing for small businesses is finding the time to consistently publish good content when many other projects needing to be delivered.

Step 3. Create Attractive CTAs

Since our goal was to create helpful content that also generated leads, we decided from the get-go that each blog post we published would have an accompanying CTA in the post. By using HubSpot’s tools, we were able to quickly determine that blog posts with custom-designed and contextual CTAs received more clicks and generated more leads for us.

To see the blog posts that have the most clicked CTAs go to “Content” > “Blog” > “View All Blog Posts.”

To take an ever deeper dive into the performance of blog posts, select a post that received a high number of CTA clicks, select the gear icon, and click “Details.” Then you’ll be able to see the number of new contacts a specific blog post has generated.

Step 4. Make Sure CTAs and Landing Pages are Relevant

Creating killer content and designing good looking CTAs won’t maximize the number of leads you gather. In addition to following steps 1 and 2, you’ll need to create contextually relevant CTAs and landing pages.

Our article on choosing event management software features a CTA that also references event management software. We believe that this is one of the reasons why this CTA has a nearly 10% click-through-rate (CTR).

Since HubSpot makes creating CTAs and landing pages very simple, there is no reason why inbound marketers shouldn’t create a new CTA and landing page for most new blog posts. That way the copy of both the CTA and the landing page will fit contextually within the blog post.

By doing this, marketers will be able to maximize the number of leads generated by blog posts and by other pieces of content that they publish.

Using HubSpot to Delight Readers and Attract Leads

As many of you may already know, content that is truly valuable to a business will delight readers by providing helpful solutions to common problems. To find topics for this kind of content, consider listening to your target audience on social media platforms, in addition to doing other forms of traditional keyword research.

Once you understand what topic your customers will find valuable, be sure to include a CTA in the piece of content in order to capture qualified leads.