Before you start your business-to-business blog, it really helps to come up with a rock solid strategy. This strategy will help guide you through the coming months as you build your blog from a newcomer to a resource in your industry. Here are a few tips for building your B2B blog strategy:
Seek to Become a Resource
Nobody likes to read blogs that are meant primarily to promote products or build a company’s image. Instead, the blogs that get real readership are blogs that aim to become a resource. Provide top quality information. This can be in the form of news, reviews, how-to articles, discussions on topics, and so on. Write content that you believe will truly help your target audience.
Know Your Specific Audience
Are you targeting CEOs of companies with revenues between $5 million and $30 million? Are you targeting other small business owners? For a B2B blog to succeed, you’ll need to know who your audience is. Trying to target everyone is a sure recipe for failure. “People in the tech industry” is not a specific audience. “Start-up companies seeking seed funding” is a much more specific audience. Write articles and posts that are relevant to this specific audience.
Create a Regular Posting Schedule
It doesn’t matter if you want to post several times a week or once a month. What is important is that you post regularly. If people come to expect your posts on a certain schedule and you suddenly don’t update for a period of time, they’ll stop returning. On the other hand, if they know that you update every month, they will come back about every month for updates. If they know you update several times a week, they will return more often.
Using the Blog to Boost Business
The ultimate purpose of a B2B blog is to build your brand, build connections and make money. How do you take a blog that is successful and turn it into a resource? First, build an email list. An email list will allow you to stay in touch with the people in your industry who already have a high opinion of you because they read your blog.
Don’t make your blog about selling your products. But don’t be afraid to sell either. If you have something to offer the industry that they will find valuable, use your blog as a resource to make that sale. B2B sales are often multi-step sales processes rather than single step online sales processes. If that is the case, use a contact form to get the people who are interested into a free phone consultation or other freebie that will initiate them into your sales process.
The basic strategy outline for a B2B blog is this: Know who you’re talking to. Become a resource to those people, then use that trust to begin a relationship that will result in you making a sale at some point in the future.
