A B2B blog can be a great way to attract customers in your market searching for solutions to the challenges that keep them from operating at top efficiency. But if your company is producing blogs, and you feel like they are being ignored in the vast pool of cyberspace, then it’s time to organize your blogging efforts as part of an integrated marketing plan.
It’s understood that B2B buyers spend a lot of time conducting online research before contacting a salesperson. If done well, and backed by a marketing plan and consistent messaging, your blog can serve as a viable resource to current and potential customers.
Here are a few things to consider when starting or adjusting your blogging strategy:
1. Quality Not Quantity
Most often, the B2B buying process is long, complex and involves many people and purchase considerations. That is good news for B2B blogs. By offering information on your blog that hits those pain points and answers those questions, you can attract a smaller, but incredibly valuable audience suited for your product offerings. With your blog, and website in general, you are trying to attract quality prospects, not general web traffic.
Attracting legitimate prospects means that they likely will dig deeper into your blog library, search for other informational content on your website and even venture into your products pages. But if your blog contains content that doesn’t offer any benefit to your specific audience, you’ll see high click-away rates after a few seconds.
2. What to Include
Our clients are B2B technology companies. That means their in-house knowledge base is rich with experts who can address a variety of in-depth industry topics. Sales and customer service teams are also a great source for identifying interesting customer questions. Then, you can take general helpful approaches, like the ones listed below, and tailor them to your specific area of expertise and target audience:
- Tips for selecting…
- Latest specialty technology for…
- How to improve operations by using…
- Choosing the right (product/service) for your operation…
- 3 things you need to know about (challenge/problem)…
As long as your posts don’t sound like brochures for your own products, it’s OK to include your own technologies and customer application stories to illustrate your solutions. The key is to come from a help-first perspective.
3. SEO Benefits of B2B Blogs
When posted on a consistent basis, blogs can improve your SEO rankings. Regularly adding new blog posts gives you more pages on your website for Google to index. In addition, blog articles are the perfect opportunity to create keyword-focused content. Because blog posts are written closely around one particular subject, they’ll likely work to improve your site’s rank for those keywords. The more frequently you post fresh, relevant blogs to your site, the more it will help with your SEO rank and driving visitors to your site.
4. Part of a Larger Marketing Plan
B2B blogs work best when they are part of an integrated, ongoing marketing strategy. To be most effective, your blog content needs to be more than a string of unrelated posts. For example, use blog posts to complement an inbound marketing workflow by including a link to further related content. These connected tactics can be tracked with a marketing automation program to measure their effectiveness as a whole. You can also share links to your blogs via social media and emails to targeted customers and prospects.
And don’t let the people responsible for researching and writing your blogs work in isolation. A fruitful, integrated blogging program is a team effort. Writers, editors, proofers, designers, web developers and SEO specialists are all important to producing winning B2B blogs.
All marketing tactics should be thought of as part of a larger whole, rather than separate pieces. By strategically integrating all marketing tactics, the marketing programs become more effective and cost efficient. As a B2B agency, we developed B2B 360 Integrated Digital Marketing to meet this improved performance need. To learn more about B2B 360 and how it will benefit your business, download our free eBook: B2B Top-Tier Tech Marketing.
