Most organisations today have a blog on their site, but have you ever thought about why you need one - or how to improve the design for better conversion?
Generally, a blog is there to help your site visitors. The content you publish will help to position you as a thought-leader within your industry (and boost your SEO presence), and ultimately helps to convert more organic blog traffic into leads.
Having a clear, lead-focused blog design and structure will help to boost the results of your inbound marketing content. If you are considering migrating your blog to HubSpot (and there are many reasons why we recommend that), there is the opportunity to optimise and improve that blog design and structure.
6 Best Practices For Your HubSpot Blog Design
Below are typical best practices recommended for HubSpot blog designs to achieve solid conversion.
1. Remove the top navigation panel
With a business blog, the goal is to encourage organic visitors to click on a CTA in order to reach a landing page offer, then convert into a lead.
One way to achieve this (aside from providing great, relevant content) is to limit distractions by removing site navigation - ie links to products, services etc - from the top of the page. This focuses all attention on the page (and task) at hand, and clearly outlines the path the visitor should take, rather than presenting other options which could move them away from the page.
2. Include navigation back to your main site via your logo
Having a blog as part of your corporate site, e.g. as a subdomain (i.e. blog.strategic-ic.co.uk) is an important step to allow first-time visitors to learn additional information about your company.
However, it’s important to make sure your blog is clearly connected to your main website, as business blogs can be a major source of new traffic from search engines and social media. A blog post may be the first thing a potential customer sees about your company, so make sure it’s easy for that new visitor to learn more about you - using your brand logo to provide a direct link back to your main site. (As an example, if you click on our logo in the top left of this blog, you'll find our homepage).
3. Include actionable CTAs
Of course to encourage your blog visitors to convert on a landing page, you’re going to need to incorporate call to actions.
But, not all CTAs are the same. On each individual blog post, it’s wise to have a top banner CTA, a bottom CTA and a sidebar CTA (which is ‘sticky’ and follows the user down the page, keeping content top of mind) for best conversion.
4. Add clear topic categories
A great blog design makes it easy for visitors to find relevant content. Adding blog categories to the top menu panel of your blog, and segmenting/categorising your blog posts by topic is a good way to achieve that. The topics you choose will depend on the industry you work in - at the top of this blog for Strategic for example, we currently have 'Inbound', 'Social Media' and 'Web'.
5. Encourage blog visitors to ‘subscribe’
Not every visitor to your blog is going to convert instantly. Some visitors need time to learn about your business - and need to be nurtured. Including a clear ‘subscribe to the blog’ CTA within your blog design will encourage people to subscribe for email updates about your blog content, and keep learning until they’re ready to read your more in-depth content offers.
6. Incorporate lead flow widgets
Lead flow widgets (such as HubSpot LeadFlows) assist the lead conversion path, moving your website or blog visitors into leads. They can appear as a slide-in box on the lower left or right of the page, may be a pop-up overlay or a dropdown banner - and can be triggered by scroll, time on page, or exit intent.
LeadFlow widgets help you take a page with a good amount of traffic, and display a relevant offer to page visitors, helping them convert into leads.
Here is an example of a LeadFlow (slide-in box on the lower left) widget:
Best Practice Considerations For Blog Post Design
Of course there’s more to consider than just the key features of your blog design. Aside from considering how you’re going to write, structure and optimise your blog posts, you’ll also need to consider how each individual post will appear on your site. For example, are you going to include social sharing icons on your blogs? Will you attribute posts to a range of authors? Do you need to include a featured image at the top of each blog post?
Having a blog hosted on HubSpot can make these considerations easier (templates, optimisation guides, easy to edit blog interfaces and more are in place to help marketers), but they are important points to address for any business blog.