This Is Why Every Successful B2B Strategy Should Include a Blog

When you consider blogging as a marketing tactic, you may naturally think it’s reserved for huge companies or hobbyists who want to share their favorite recipes and conspiracy theories. The truth is that blogging is crucial for all companies – from miniscule to enterprise, B2B to B2C.

Nearly half of all marketers claim that blogging is the single most important piece of their content strategy. Furthermore, there is a ton of evidence suggesting that it’s time for your business to join the blogosphere, if it hasn’t already. Here is why you should use blogging as part of your B2B marketing strategy.

1. You can enlist more subscribers

More pages means more leads. B2B marketers that leverage a blog generate 67% more leads than those who don’t. From your blog, you can enlist email and text message (SMS) subscribers, qualify them, then start rolling out your sales campaigns. The size of a contact list has no limit, yet is difficult to build without a blog. Those subscribers are more likely to find you in the first place if you have more content pages.

Find out what your target audience is interested in, besides your products, and start rolling out topics they will actually want to read. Include a subscription form for your email list and/ or instructions on how to subscribe to receive text message communications. People aren’t likely to subscribe to your email list after landing on the home page.

Note that you do not want to send any type of communications to people who have not opted in. The repercussions of spamming other businesses can be detrimental to your business. If you’re still buying contacts from others or harvesting email addresses from LinkedIn, it’s definitely time to start blogging.

2. This is the least expensive brand-building tactic

Without paying for third party media, you can tremendously build your B2B brand. 60% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after reading custom content on their blog. When you have something to offer another company, aside from your products and services, you come out ahead.

When blogging for other businesses, try to solve their problems by finding out what their pain points are and providing solutions. For example, if you are an organic fertilizer company, and your target market is farmers, one of their pain points may be rodent infestation. So, an article that poses helpful solutions for keeping rodents out of crops would help you build trust amongst your audience.

With a website and social media presence alone, you won’t get everything you can out of your digital marketing efforts. If you’re relying solely on sales pages (Home, About, Product Overview, etc.) and Facebook posts to help build your brand, consider adding a blog to the mix.

3. You want to see higher return on investment (ROI)

When you start blogging, you increase the odds of improving ROI for digital marketing efforts. 71% of B2B research begins with a generic online search. This means that your target buyers are out there searching for you right now. If you want them to find you, search presence should be top priority.

Sales don’t just happen. You have to do your part to orchestrate them. Blogging is the first obvious step to take. From a blog, you can drive the businesses you serve into your sales funnel.

4. Blogs improve search engine rankings

Employed as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) plan, a blog will improve your website’s pagerank in the eyes of Google, which is essential in the information age. As a rule, websites that include a blog tend to have about 434% more indexed pages than those without. This means that blogs create a foundation for which Google and other search engines to harvest more information from your blog. This is how a blog helps your website’s SEO.

Modern B2B marketing is less about advertising to your target businesses, and more about having a conversation with them – attraction marketing. You aren’t going to be able to reach people in the same way that you once could online. Having many pages with targeted keywords gives you more opportunities to rank pages for specific searches that your target audience might be conducting. Maintaining a blog provides the opportunity for you to create unlimited pages.

Keywords for SEO

The first thing you’ll want to do is generate a list of targeted keywords. This is how to go about finding the right ones.

1. Find a forum where your target audience congregates, use one of your competitors’ websites, or find a wikipedia page that relates to your top keyword.
2. Enter the URL of the page you choose into Google’s Keyword Planner.
3. Choose your product / service category.
4. Choose your target audience based on demographics and location.
5. Click the “Get Ideas” button.

The keyword planner tool will return a large list of possible keywords to use in your blog. From this list, you can then choose which keywords you would like to use, and create your own plan for writing about relevant topics. To target your posts even further, learn more about long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords

The easiest way to find a long tail keyword is to conduct your short keyword phrase in Google. You will be given a list of long tail keywords, highlighted with links under “Searches related to (your search term).”

If you see a relevant term in the related searches list, this is the best place to start. From there, your topics can be fine-tuned for engagement and clickability.

Crafting your headlines

There are several tools available, for crafting clickable headlines. One of the most helpful is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. Simply enter your desired title into the analyzer, and let the tool guide you to discovery of the most engaging wording.

You don’t have to use all of these tools to craft engaging blog posts, but they make the job much easier.

5. Your posts might go viral

Every digital marketer’s dream is to go viral. Though the definition is up for debate, the fact is that the more content you publish, the higher your odds of at least one page going viral. 20 years ago, marketing and advertising professionals relied on television, radio, print, and billboard advertising (traditional media) to promote their brands. Now, in the information age, advertising distribution has transformed.

Broadcast distribution vs viral distribution

You need to understand the difference between broadcast and viral distribution to wrap your head around what makes blogging invaluable.

• Broadcast distribution (diffusion) is when an original message is sent out to many people at the same time. The original message is only seen once.
• Viral distribution (diffusion) is when an original message is sent out to any number of people at the same time and those people can then share the original message with as many people as they like.

Traditional media tends to be delivered with broadcast diffusion. Though it still has it’s place in marketing and advertising, viral distribution provides a transmuted diffusion method. Now, with blogging, video marketing, and social media, many people are able to see an original message many times. This creates the opportunity for more sales based on a single effort.

With blogging, your potential ROI immediately increases. Your prospective sales with a blog, paired with an automated sales funnel, are virtually unlimited. Don’t let this boundless marketing opportunity slip away.

What if you’re intimidated by blogging?

Blogging doesn’t seem to be for everyone. One of the main reasons that some companies choose not to blog is that they don’t believe they have enough to say. It seems safe to assume that others simply don’t want to write. If you fall into this category – still intimidated by blogging – don’t fret. You can take advantage of all the benefits offered by a blog without worrying about the workload. Here are two options for you.

1. Outsource your blogging. There are literally thousands of specialized writers out there to create content for any niche. B2B is not excluded. If you don’t want to do the writing yourself, consider contracting someone else to do it for you. You can hire a writer, full time, or connect with a freelancer to work on your blog a few hours each week.
2. Invite ghost bloggers to write on your website. It’s always best to post at least some branded content, but you might be amazed how many people would love the opportunity to write quality articles for you. By writing for you, ghost bloggers can build their own brands and sometimes link out to their own websites. This doesn’t cost you a penny, and you maintain full control over the parameters of the writing.

So, you see, blogging isn’t the big, scary monster you might have thought.

Conclusion

Understanding why blogging should be included in your B2B marketing efforts is the first step on the road to higher online sales. It helps you enlist more subscribers and build your brand with less expense than other tactics. With blogging, you will see a higher ROI and better ranking in search engines. If you don’t want to blog yourself, you don’t even have to – you can get someone else to do most of the writing for you. Share this article with your colleagues on Facebook, and let everyone know how crucial a B2B blog really is.