Converting Blog Visitors into Clients

Written By : Clifford Blodgett

You may already be blogging, or perhaps you’re about to start. You’ve heard that writing informative, engaging blogs can help you accomplish a number of goals, such as:

• driving traffic to your website
• building credibility with peers in your industry
• establishing your online reputation
• creating relationships with potential clients

And yet, what you really want to know is:  How do blogs help me convert prospects into clients?

You’re all about return on investments, so it’s no wonder you want to know exactly how your efforts will pay off in the form of increased business.

While you’re likely to reap more than a single reward from blogging, this three-part series of articles will explore the mechanisms that help you convert prospects into clients.

Step One: Learn about your audience.

Before you can write blogs that engage your audience, you have to understand what type of information your readers are likely to value! Ask yourself these questions each time you sit down to write a blog article:

• Who is my audience?
• How old are they?
• What do they do for a living? How educated are they? Are they married?
• What is their income? What kind of lives do they live?
• What concerns my audience? What questions do they have?
• What type of information will interest them?
• How can I help them?

Naturally, there will sometimes be more than one answer to these questions. But, you should see a general trend in your answers, which will help you to understand the goal of each blog that you write.

Sometimes you might reach out to other professionals in your industry, but at other times you want to deepen your relationships with prospective clients. It’s easy to see that the blogs you write to a CPA or estate planning attorney might not be very interesting to your average prospect. This is why seeking to understand your audience is always the first step to writing any blog.

Once you learn to adjust the tone, style, and language of your writing according to the interests of your audience, your blogs will more successfully gain (and keep) the interest of your targets.

Step Two: Take a problem-solving approach.

It’s fine to share information simply for the sake of education, but you will find that your most popular blogs are the ones that provide solutions to your readers’ problems. For example, a blog that merely describes inflation won’t be nearly as helpful as one that provides solutions for combating it.

That’s not to say that you should give away all of your secrets! You want your audience to feel enticed to learn more. Demonstrate possible solutions to your prospects’ problems, while urging them to work with a financial advisor to develop the best plan for their unique situation.

Finally, remember to include a call to action in your blogs. In exchange for free information or some other valuable offer, ask your readers to provide their personal information. Now that you have their email addresses, you are in the driver’s seat of the relationship. You can continue to contact them and deepen your interactions.

Now that you’ve begun to build a relationship with your prospects, continue reading the next blogs in this series to find out how blogging converts them into clients.

Filed under: Financial Advisor Marketing, Social Media for Financial Advisors