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You just passed through the doors of your clients building, and you have momentum. You’ve just finished a great appointment, and while there isn’t an immediate purchase in the works, you know it will be coming six months down the road.

So, what do you do until then?

Six months can be a long time, and there’s always the risk that a competitor will work his way into your opportunity. Or, the prospect could forget about you and wind up looking for a different IT solution provider. It’s easy to see how this deal could slip through your fingers. You need a way to keep this contact engaged until the time to buy arrives.

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I’ve had clients and internal stakeholders ask me some pretty detailed about their corporate blog performance. They’ve wanted to know why their bounce rates are so high, why they aren’t getting more traffic from search engines and why the pageviews-to-visit ratio is so low. In some cases, these are valid questions to ask about a corporate blog, but generally, they are pretty close to irrelevant. When you launch a corporate blog – either to market your company or provide information or support to existing customers – you need to focus on the right metrics.

Especially for corporate bloggers who either consume mass media blog content regularly (or who got their starts writing for independent mass market blogs), it’s natural to use the metrics that have become accepted in those venues. Unique visitors, pageviews and stickiness measures directly indicate the performance of blogs like Technorati and Gadling because of the underlying business model. However, they don’t speak directly to the success of your corporate blog. The reason for this is pretty simple: traffic does not directly drive revenue for your organization. It may contribute to sales possibilities down the road, but it doesn’t offer a straight connection, particularly in the B2B space.

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Most marketers are still using social media tools for in-platform branding, which translates to lost opportunity. According to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa, 78 percent of respondents are participating on company branded or managed social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, with another 63 percent using microblogging tools (e.g., Twitter). Content sharing, blogging and social media news releases also receive a considerable amount of attention, at 63 percent, 59 percent and 48 percent of respondents, respectively.

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The next time you take a look at the analytics for your corporate blog, go deeper than the dashboard. Down in the weeds, you’ll find information directly applicable to your sales efforts. Mine this data, and communicate it to your sales team: they will have a powerful new tool for getting inside their targets’ heads.

There are many ways you can use your corporate blog’s analytics to drive revenue gains across your company. Here are my five favorites:

1. Watch who’s watching: Don’t (just) look at volume. Instead, take a peek at the company names. You can use this to find out who in your target market is interested in your company. Also, take a look at the posts they are reading. This will provide insight into the specific products or services they are exploring.

2. Check for repeat visits: Do some companies keep coming back? This speaks to level of interest and commitment to your brand, not to mention specific business issues or products or services. Frequency and regularity translate to higher potential for entry into the sales cycle and conversion.

3. Dig into keywords: When a visitor uses a search engine to come to your corporate blog, the keywords used can be telling. Keep an eye open for those that indicate a business pain point or particular product or service.

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Unless you’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the minutiae of social media marketing, you’d probably think that having a story retweeted dozens of times will translate to a hefty increase in pageviews and exposure for your corporate blog. Well, as you’re planning your social media marketing strategy – as with any marketing effort – it pays to think about the people you’re actually targeting.

I’ve always been stunned by the disparity between the action a story gets on Twitter and the actual amount of blog traffic to which it translates. It seems that one really doesn’t have much to do with the other, and a recent study shows why.

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Don’t just let your blog talk for you — let it talk to you, too! Forget about reader comments; corporate blogs don’t generate much. Instead, focus on your analytics. There’s a lot you can learn from these numbers. Here are four dimensions to watch when “listening” to what your blog has to say to you:

1. Which stories are getting the most pageviews: this tells you what interests your readers/market most. You might be surprised to learn, sometimes, that what you think is most important doesn’t matter much to your readers.

2. Return visitors: this tells you how many readers keep coming back to your blog. You want this number to be high — but leave room in your analysis for a healthy rate of first-time visits — who hopefully will become repeat readers later.

3. Referred traffic: this tells you who is linking to your blog. These are the people who are “broadcasting” your message to a wider audience. Think of it as a form of brand advocacy.

4. Service providers: this tells you the name of the network for a particular visitor to your blog. Home and small business users will be concealed by the name of the ISP, which is just a major telecom provider. For larger businesses, however, it’s usually a form of the company name. Send this info over to your sales team.

What marketing functions are you outsourcing?

The latest data from MarketingSherpa suggests that many companies are planning to outsource more of their marketing functions. Even with much of marketing’s capabilities remaining in-house, the advantages of outsourcing — for scale or capabilities — are starting to be noticed.

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To say the IT industry is flooded with event-like marketing activities is an understatement. Yet, I can’t remember a single case where a marketing or sales professional from an IT manufacturer or solution provider told me that these events were critical to business growth. They keep doing it anyway, though, and the leads just aren’t following.

So, why does the IT sector still use all these events for marketing? That’s easy: it’s what they’ve always done. For some companies, there’s a shortage of marketing resources and experience, which makes it hard to do anything that hasn’t been done before. For others, it’s a way to spend MDF, which often becomes an end in itself.

The problem isn’t with marketing events: they can be very effective. Rather, IT solution providers need to figure out how to turn them into lead generation activities. Here are three ways you can make your IT marketing events more compelling (and productive):

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Are you looking at e-mail open rates as a success metric? Well, it’s time to get past that. While this measure does provide some indication of interest in your newsletter, it still doesn’t get the recipient into the sales cycle … and that’s what matters most! Of course, there is still some value to open rate, as it helps gauge interest in your message, but it’s only a first step, and you need to track the entire set of results.

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