4 Keys to Successful Blogging for B2B Content Marketing

B2B content marketingWe’re close to one month into the New Year and so far I’ve read several blogs on the top marketing predictions for this year. To no surprise, content marketing is at the top of all of them.

Content marketing is expected to take off and gain even more traction, making it one of the primary forms of marketing for B2B businesses in 2014.

What’s the best way your organization can embrace B2B content marketing this year? Your blog!

Last week I attended a great webinar by Rachel Foster of Fresh Perspective B2B Copywriting Services titled “Blogging for B2B Content Marketing”. It covered many of the reasons why your company’s blog is a great channel for reaching targeted leads.

Here are 4 pointers from Rachel’s webinar.

1. Know Your Audience

In order to reach targeted leads, you need to know the characteristics of your ideal customer (i.e. your “buyer persona”). What is their job and what do their duties consist of? What are their struggles, pains, wants and needs? Knowing how your product or service will ideally fit into their lives will help you produce compelling content in your blog that is in line with their interests.

2. Create Helpful Content

Knowing and understanding your ideal customer’s struggles, pains, wants, and needs is not enough. You need to create content that is educational and helpful in solving one of their pain points. If you’re in the business of designing websites, your blog posts could focus on typical coding problems and how to solve them or things to look out for when redesigning your website and could take the form of how-to/step-by-step blogs, case studies, video guides, etc. They key though is to stick to concepts that someone seeking your services would need to know.

3. Post, Post, Post

You need to make yourself top of mind for your customer. In order to do that, you need to be posting regularly. Content marketing is not a one-off campaign – your efforts need to be constant. Consider creating a content calendar, made up of weekly, bi-weekly or monthly (depending on your time and resources) blog post ideas that solve problems inspired by your buyer personas.

The proof is in the numbers…

In a study, V2 Marketing Communications found that 98% of companies that blogged multiple times a day received a customer through it. Now, obviously blogging several times per day is quite a lot to take on, especially if you don’t have a full-time marketing team. However, the study also found that 78% of companies that blogged daily also found a customer. If that still seems like too much of a commitment, the study also found that 70% of companies that blogged weekly (2-3 times) received at least one customer through blogging. The takeaway? It’s definitely worth your time and effort.

4. Promote Your Material

It seems like an obvious next step, yet many companies forget or just don’t do it. Adapt and share your content on all of your social channels to increase its visibility and its overall impact. You can also use your social channels as an extension of your blog by creating Q & A sessions on Google+, Twitter or Facebook, or creating a YouTube channel of video guides that a prospective customer would find useful.

Overall, if you want to generate quality leads, a helpful and informative company blog can definitely help. Creating content that your ideal customer will benefit from will help them see you as a leader in your field. When it comes time to buy, you’ll be the one they think of first.

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4 Keys to Successful Blogging for B2B Content Marketing