10 Recommendations for B2B Blog Writing
Content marketing has become even more essential for B2B marketers. But what’s the best way to write B2B blogs and execute B2B content marketing strategies? This short blog will give you 10 important tips to help you succeed.
Serve, Don’t Sell: Effective B2B content marketing is highly dependent on providing real value to readers, not selling your products. Your service-based content might offer answers to confounding, contemporary challenges… deliver a list of best practices… provide thought-leadership on critical industry issues… but each of your blogs should provide meaningful insights or assistance. This is priority one.
Know Thy Customer: B2B customers are professionals. The best of them are highly skilled. To attract their attention and ultimately secure their business, the advice and information you provide should be well-tuned to the challenges they are facing today.
Have A Plan: A blogging/content marketing strategy is not “one and done.” B2B sales cycles can be long. Ideally, your individual blogs support a corporate or product narrative that aligns with your product/service advantages or company mission. Building a content calendar — and blogging with some regularity — is important. Depending on your audience, your cadence might be once a month, three times a week, or when important issues demand a perspective, but regardless, communicating continuously makes a difference. Plus, if your blogs all support a common narrative, you can link to prior posts and build readership and engagement.
Deliver Quality, Not Quantity: As stated, your communication frequency can vary, but the caliber of the information you provide shouldn’t — all your blogs should be very good. It’s better to do fewer blogs that may require more thought or research than multiple posts with mediocre value.
Remember Location, Location, Location: Successful content marketing isn’t just about what you’re saying, it’s also about where you’re saying it. Give appropriate consideration as to how to gain maximum readership among the exact targets you want to reach. This might include distribution via trade publications, email lists, LinkedIn communities, your sales team, your website homepage, or other alternatives. But remember, just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.
Have Them “At Hello”: Blog headlines and opening sentences are obviously key. They should provoke the interest of the reader to want to find out more. Both fact-based headlines and curiosity-provoking headlines can be highly effective, e.g., The Top 10 AI Trends for 2018 or The Little-Known Sales-Closing Technique That Works Amazingly Well.
Simple Can Be Smart: Don’t be afraid of short sentences, simple words, paragraph breaks, bulleted lists, etc. This makes for an easier read and increases the likelihood your audience will make it to the end of your blog and take any action you might suggest.
Write Completely, But Concisely: B2B blogs should provide a meaningful benefit to the clients you do business with and/or prospects who are likely to buy from you. Blogs that can accomplish this are often a minimum of 500 words, but blogs that rate higher in SEO can often be 2,000+ words. Having said this, a good blog post should be carefully edited to remove any superfluous content that is not helpful and/or entertaining to the reader.
Write Naturally, But Purposefully: Be natural in how you write — it’s fine to interject some of your personality — but be purposeful in including some keywords throughout your blog. These keywords will help Google identify the post and serve it up against relevant searches. And don’t obsess about perfection. Done is better than perfect. Blog writing can be laborious – and if you’re finding the process takes too long, you might stop doing it.
Think Visually And Verbally: Often times, communications is often better conveyed and more widely consumed when it’s visually appealing. Think about including pictures, charts, infographics, or step away from the page entirely and use video.
We hope these 10 tips were helpful. We at Rung-UP are always happy to help you succeed.
Lawrence M. Kimmel is CEO of Rung-UP. The agency’s campaigns have reached almost one billion people – while spending virtually nothing on paid advertising. He can be reached at Hi@Rung-UP.com.