How Smart Marketers Use a Business Blog

As if there weren’t enough benefits to creating blog content like… 

• Establishing authority, trust and goodwill with prospects and customers
• Building an owned media property (from which you can advertise your products and services)
• Bringing inbound traffic to your website via SEO, email marketing and social sharing

… now comes the most compelling reason of all to create blog content: SEGMENTATION.

Right Offer, Right Person

What do we know about someone that reads a blog post about increasing factory productivity? What about an article about no-load mutual funds? Tuning a guitar?

Pretty obvious, right? We know they’re interested in improving manufacturing processes, personal finance or or awakening their inner Stevie Ray Vaughan.

What if these readers could be “tagged” in some way so you could follow up with a manufacturing consulting, financial planning or guitar sale offer?

You can. It’s called ad retargeting and when combined with blog content it creates a powerful one-two punch.

Business Blog + Ad Retargeting = ROI

Ad platforms like Google and Facebook allow you to serve ads to website visitors based on the pages they visit on your website.

And, as we’ve seen, a visit to a page on your website can be all we need to make the right offer.

Let’s look at a simple example like a website that ultimately sells recipe books.   They have developed offers for prospects with these dietary restrictions…

• Vegetarian
• Gluten Free
• Vegan

A few recipes are placed on the company blog that would identify the right prospect for each offer. When traffic from any source (SEO, social media, paid media, email marketing, etc) visits these recipe pages, the prospects are “tagged” and added to a retargeting list.

In Facebook, for example, these lists are called Website Custom Audiences.

The process looks like this…

Traffic that visits a recipe page on the blog is “tagged” and added to the appropriate Website Custom Audience in Facebook.

Now, the only thing left is to make the appropriate offer to the right audience based on their behavior.

In this simple example, you’ll make the vegetarian book offer to vegetarians, the vegan offer to vegans and… well - you get the idea.

It looks like this…

What blog content could you create that would segment your prospects and allow you to follow up with the right offer?

For example, we run this Lead Magnet ad below to website visitors that have read articles on DigitalMarketer.com about social media marketing. After all, they’ve shown interest in the subject and they’ve shown interest in our company by visiting our website.

So… why a blog?

You can (and should) be retargeting visitors to other pages on your website such as your product pages. By visiting a product page, a website visitor is showing interest in that offer.

That said, the business blog is the perfect retargeting medium when the goal is new lead and customer acquisition because:

• Content is “Value First” – By leading with content that has stand-alone value, we build “goodwill” with prospects. (See my June 2015 GKIC article entitled “Striking a Balance Between Direct Response and Branding” for more on this topic)
• Content is shared – Blog posts that entertain, educate or inspire are shared on the social web. The visits generated by social sharing grow the size of your retargeting lists for follow up.
• Content is discovered – Blog posts are much more likely to be served as search results in Google (and other search engines) when prospects search for solutions to the problems your business solves. The visits generated by search also grow the size of your retargeting lists.
• Content keeps your list warm – If you’re pounding your email list with offer after offer, you’d be well served to mix it up with some valuable content. And, while you’re at it, you’ll be segmenting your email list and building retargeting lists.

How to Get Set up

Setting the retargeting script on your website is simple. Anyone that can add a piece of code to your website will have ad retargeting set up on your website in seconds.

More important to your success will be structuring the segmentation. If you’ve already created content on your website, you’ll start by looking at your website analytics. Look for blog content already getting website traffic from sources like search, social media or referring websites. These blog posts can begin building retargeting lists immediately.

Then, match this existing content (and any you create going forward) back to the appropriate offer you will make to begin transitioning this prospect to a lead or customer.

For example, those that visit these two blog posts on DigitalMarketer.com are showing interest in email marketing…

Website traffic that visits these two blog posts are showing interest in email marketing and will be made the relevant offer on ad retargeting networks.

If you’ve been skeptical about the ROI of business blogging in the past, perhaps this new era of ad retargeting will change your mind.

Because, as you know, this whole marketing thing gets a heck of a lot easier when you make the right offer to the right prospect.

Want to learn more about retargeting and running a business blog? Read these two articles...

• [Test Results] The "Pixel Process": How Digital Marketer Gets 81% More Leads and 38% More Sales From Paid Traffic
• [Checklist] The 5-Point Business Blog Accelerator

Author Bio:

Ryan Deiss is the co-founder of Idea Incubator LP and CEO of DigitalMarketer.com. He launched his first web-based business from his college dorm room in 1999, and since that time he's founded over 40 different businesses in markets such as health and beauty, survival and preparedness, DIY crafts and home improvement, investing and finance, chemical and liquid filter manufacturing, business lending, online skills training and menswear...just to name a few.

In fact, over the last 36 months Ryan and his team have:

• Invested over $15,000,000 on marketing tests...
• Generated tens of millions of unique visitors...
• Sent well over a BILLION permission-based emails, and...
• Run approximately 3,000 split and multi-variant tests...

In addition to operating multiple businesses, Ryan is also a highly sought after author, speaker and consultant whose work has impacted over 250,000 businesses in 68 different countries.