Organic growth translates to missed opportunities. When you launch your corporate blog, don’t sit back and wait for readers to come to you … and then wait some more for them to step into your sales cycle. Instead, seek them out, and use your blog as a first step in lead qualification.

Combine direct and social media marketing, and you’ll gain a powerful demand generation tool.

Blogs do have a tendency to be discovered (i.e., to gain readers). Whether it’s through searches, a link on your website, a PR effort or tweets and status updates, traffic happens … it just happens slowly. And since high-value readers are likely to be only a small portion of your organic traffic, you could be waiting quite a bit before your social media marketing effort generates any leads. Take a proactive approach, and this changes drastically and quickly.

Push your blog.

Rather than just build and write, include a regular newsletter in your social media marketing plan. Reach out to the names on your house list, and watch what they click. Use this as a platform for engagement.

The click-throughs will tell you who is interested in exploring a solution and give you a sense of what the pain points are. You gain an opportunity for targeted, informed outreach in a number of forms – from future direct mail campaigns to sales calls.

Work your blog; don’t wait for your blog to work for you. The reward is accelerated ROI!