How a Startup-Friendly CRM Can Enhance Your Content Strategy
A solid CRM system can help you identify and categorize new leads, as well as understand your current customers better and find cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Most traditional CRMs, however, are built for enterprise customers, which often means that they depend largely on manual data input and tend to fall short on user experience.
Jeroen Corthout, co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, shares that – if you don’t keep up with the input system – “at some point it won’t contain all the information and you won’t be able to rely on it anymore to be a practical sales tool. You start filling it out less and, in the end, you just stop using it and it becomes useless.”
Jeroen believes that “sales is not about having a database, it’s about communicating with people,” which is why Salesflare strives to help small and mid-sized B2B companies build better relationships and sell more.
At its core, Salesflare offers an easy-to-understand solution that helps CRM users every step of the way – from outreach to closing.
“You can do everything by yourself if you’d like to,” Jeroen adds, “you get on the software and it shows you how to work with it. There are walkthroughs, checklists, videos, articles. Obviously, if you need us, we’re there and we go further with our support than many others, but we try to make our support unnecessary.”
Combining the Skills of Sales and Marketing
Salesflare excels at gathering information from a variety of sources (e.g. email, social media, company databases, and phone) and pulling this customer data automatically.
Because an easy-to-use CRM saves your sales team time navigating complex solutions, they can spend more time nurturing customers and gaining insights into how they actually feel, how they’re using your product, and what they are saying about your brand.
Ultimately, these unprecedented insights can be immensely useful for creating a more powerful content strategy that improves the way you win and keep customers happy.
By working together, your sales and marketing teams ensure that you’re not flying blind and help you:
Come up with fresh content ideas
Better establish the pain points of your buyer personas
Build a more effective sales enablement strategy
5 Strategies to Double the Traffic to Your Blog
By now, most marketers are already convinced that blogging is a valuable marketing tool that can help you gain a trusted name in the digital market, provide value to your readers, and gain more exposure.
Unsurprisingly, 56% of marketers who leverage blogging say it’s effective and 10% say it generates the biggest ROI.
All in all, it’s hard to deny that SaaS businesses with robust blogs have more search potential and, in the majority of cases, can implement SEO strategies much easier.
Content marketing, however, is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Once your blog is up and running, the next big challenge is working out how to bring more traffic to it and, ideally, sustain it.
In less than a month, Salesflare managed to double its organic search traffic, going from 10,000 organic visits a day to nearly 18,000.
Let’s walk through five key strategies that the company used to build out its strategy and double its blog’s traffic.
Focusing on Google’s Core Web Vitals
Truth is, no one wants to wait for a website that takes too long to load. So if your site is slow, chances are, people will leave before you even get a chance to show them your content.
Good user experience is a crucial ranking factor, and improving your blog’s performance is becoming increasingly important.
Google defines the core elements of a website that enhance user experience as Core Web Vitals. Along with page load time, Core Web Vitals cover page quality signals such as responsiveness and the visual stability of content.
Although all this might sound complicated, one great thing about Google’s Core Web Vitals is their user-friendly approach. Even without extensive technical skills, you can test these signals with a number of different lab and field testing tools to get a good overview of what needs improvement.
On your blog, you can start improving your Core Web Vitals score by:
Using a caching plugin
Optimizing and compressing images
Providing proper dimensions for images and embeds
Updating and Republishing Relevant Content
Republishing some of your most relevant posts is an excellent way to get more mileage out of these pieces.
“We republish a lot of content. We update it, we post it again, and we repromote it. That also helps to push up that post in the rankings, and Google likes it when you keep content up-to-date,” Jeroen shares.
Along with improving your posts’ positions in the SERPs, republishing content is also great for:
Maintaining search rankings. If you have an old, well-performing post that ranks nicely in the SERP, enhancing it and republishing it can help hold its position and boost organic traffic.
Note: To maintain and improve your post’s ranking, you will need to ensure that the republished piece is currently accurate. Check details such as titles, links, CTAs, and stats and update them as needed.
Lending your editorial calendar a helping hand in (advance of) busy times. Whether it’s a predictable event (e.g. an annual conference or summit) or an unexpected one, your normal work responsibilities might change at times. By republishing content, you ensure that the cadence does not change.
Crafting Evergreen Content
Regardless of whether you decide to republish and re-promote your content or not, to ensure you bring users long-term value and relevance, you’ll need a mix of both timely and timeless content.
Timeless, evergreen content is high-quality content that’s centered around a topic that brings consistent interest and search volume. By its very nature, evergreen content has staying power, which means that it can also be repurposed over and over again.
Executed well, creating content that carries the same value as time passes – and consistently improving it – is great because it:
Ranks well in SERPs because of its quality and ongoing relevancy.
Contributes a steady, continuous amount of traffic into your blog long after you publish it.
Goes beyond just scratching the surface and helps you become a go-to resource. Even more so, because the reader can find everything they need from your post, they don’t have to look for other resources to supplement the information.
Offers an excellent opportunity for adding backlinks.
Blog posts with high evergreen potential often include tutorials/how-tos on topics that don’t change, listicles of curated content, and answers to frequently asked questions in your industry.
Podcasting
No matter what niche you’re in, having a podcast can be very beneficial for reaching new people and bringing extra value to your current audience.
Because podcasts help your audience feel a connection with your brand, including them in your audio strategy is a great way to build and increase your blog’s audience and give people an easily accessible way to consume your content.
Jeroen from Salesflare started podcasting three years ago as a way to connect with startup founders. “I have a podcast in which we look for the person behind a company. Usually, a slightly more well-known company, so that people can identify themselves,” he reflects, “it makes the founder’s journey a bit less lonely if they can see that other people are going through similar things.”
Here are three ways to use podcasting to drive more traffic to your blog:
Cross-post between your podcast and blog. You can, for instance, use show notes and include all relevant links and information from an episode, directing listeners to your blog for more resources and tips.
Invite guests to your podcast. Consider any experts, influencers, or thought-leaders who are likely to have valuable insights for your audience.
Connect with other podcasts for collaboration. Arguably one of the most effective strategies for gaining exposure to larger audiences who can help grow your show and, by extension, your blog is to get on podcasts and share more about your brand.
Generating Social Proof
Social proof is based on the idea that, in times of uncertainty, people tend to adopt the actions or opinions of people they trust.
In digital marketing, social proof covers a similar idea – when people shop or look around for solutions to their problem, they want to see reviews, recommendations, and ways others have used a product before making a buying decision.
When utilized well, social proof is a remarkably persuasive tool that can have a huge impact on traffic and conversions.
Reviews are a commonly used form of social proof that can work wonders for your business. In fact, did you know that 84% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations?
This is one of the main reasons why many businesses go the extra mile to get customers to review their products. Along with social media reviews and reviews on third-party websites, other common social proof examples include:
Customer testimonials
Case studies
Expert or influencer endorsements
Awards
Even if you’re just starting out, there are plenty of ways to gain social proof to promote your blog. One advice Salesflare’s CEO has is to approach users directly and collect testimonials or ask them to write a review. He shares: “We just ask people. When you ask as a human being to another human being, that’s a very powerful thing.”
To get the best possible results out of your strategy, you’ll also need to identify the right moment to ask for a review. As Jeroen adds, the best time to ask people for a review is when they’re excited. For example, “when they’re new in the software, when they’re signing up, the moment they pay, or when they are super happy with the support.“
Ready to Get Strategic About Your Content Marketing?
Whether you’re just getting started with crafting content that attracts traffic or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it’s always a good idea to revisit your strategy and make sure it’s optimized, innovative, and engaging for both your current and future customers.
Looking to strengthen your digital marketing efforts? Take a look at how our content marketing services can help you achieve consistent growth over time.
©Copyright 2023.All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer : This advertisement and the information related to it are provided and maintained by the advertiser. Atipes.com is not responsible and can not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this advertisement. Please note that every advertisement for rent or for sale should at a minimum, display the energy performance rating of the property. See our Flats and Housing Posting Rules for more information.
Avoid scams: Signs of fraud: wire transfer, money orders, cashier checks, payment via gift cards, shipping, escrow, "transaction protection", "guarantee". Be safe by dealing locally.
