As more businesses start using social media tools to promote themselves to the same audience, you get greater competition by the day. B2B blogging is an efficient strategy that gives you more opportunities to promote your brand. When the businesses you’re targeting see high-quality content at your site, you’ll get much greater authority in their eyes.
You’ll certainly agree that blogging is a successful strategy to implement into your overall marketing approach. The only question is: how do you do that? How can you find enough time to write blogs and how can you make them awesome? Read on; we have 5 techniques that will help you master the art of B2B blogging.
Develop a content strategy
If you were about to start blogging about general things, we would start these tips with “choose your niche.” There is no need for that, since you already know what you’ll blog about. You have a specific audience you want to attract through your content strategy. Thus, you can start by analyzing the needs of your audience and developing that content strategy.
That’s not as simple as it sounds. First of all, you need to take a good look at your website’s analytics. The activity at your site shows where the traffic is coming from and what search terms the visitors used before they landed at your site. That will help you identify the main topics your audience is interested in.
All these activities will help you determine a content strategy, which should identify the main theme, goals, and activities related to the blog.
Develop an editorial calendar
Once you have the content strategy, you can start identifying several topics to start with. If your website is already popular and you’ve develop a relatively strong presence on social media, you can simply ask them what issues they have and how your blog can bring the solutions. Another method that helps you discover the questions of your audience is searching through Quora, Reddit, specific industry forums, LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and the blogs of your competition.
HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator is a great tool to use when you don’t know what to write about. Just enter 3 relevant nouns, and the algorithm will generate a list of cool topics that can serve as ideas. The grammar and logic in the suggestions won’t be perfect, but they will give you the initial spark of inspiration.
Once you have a decent list of potential blog posts, you can develop the content strategy. Use an online calendar, such as Time-Off Manager or Google Calendar, to schedule the publication dates for those posts and plan their completion in stages. Then, you’ll continue upgrading that strategy as you start getting feedback from the readers.
Find your writers
Blogging is a much more complex activity than social media posting. It demands more planning, more writing, and much higher quality. If you’re developing a B2B blog, you might as well make it perfect right from the start. When you read awesome blogs from your industry, do you think they are maintained by the owners or marketers of these businesses? No; most of the posts are written by actual writers with experience in the niche.
Is there a social superstar in the company? Maybe you can add the blogging activity to his/her duties. It’s important to find a writer with strong, authentic voice and an ability to help people find solutions. If there isn’t such a writer in the company, then you can always outsource the blogging tasks to a pro. You can hire an expert writer at AssignmentMasters, a consulting source for everyone who needs writing and editing assistance.
Connect the posts to one another
This is one of the most important tips you can get for B2B blogging: you should not publish dead-end posts. Of course, you won’t have another piece of content at your blog to link to when you develop the first post, but you can still link to your main website. It’s important to tell the reader what action he needs to take once he finishes reading your content. You offered some tips and solutions, and then what? Invite the readers to comment on the post and share it via social media, and tell them how your products and services can help them achieve the goals you suggest in the articles.
As you continue launching new posts, you’ll cross-link the content at the blog. Find a way to relate each post with previous ones, as well as some products and services at your site. Include a section “you might be interested in…” at the end of the articles, and your readers will continue browsing through the blog when they finish reading the post they came for.
Measure the results. Learn from them!
A marketing expert already knows this, but there is no harm in emphasizing it once again: you have to measure the results in order to know how successful your project is. How do you measure the blogging achievements? The good-old Google Analytics has all metrics you need: the bounce rates, the time your visitors spend on a single page, the clicks you get per post, etc.
Watch the results and focus on the themes, topics, and style that engage your audience. Don’t forget to experiment a bit with the types of posts you launch. Publish a listicle, an in-depth post, a brief piece, and an infographic. The activity of your audience will show which types of posts achieve the best results, so you’ll focus developing more of that content in future.
There is nothing complex in a blog: it’s a tool for publishing articles. Those articles, however, have great potential to promote your business to the right audience. The 5 tips above will help you achieve that mission.