Marketing teams have a tendency to go through cycles. You may go to a conference or have a planning meeting and it sends your brain soaring. You’re energized and ambitious, full of ideas you expect to revolutionize your marketing strategy. Then you get caught up in the busy day-to-day of your job. That enthusiasm fades little by little. You abandon most of those ideas you had. For the ones you don’t abandon, you don’t have as much energy left for the execution as you originally did, so it comes out as lackluster.
The key is finding a new marketing project that’s both powerful and doable. In 2019, it’s all about your blog strategy. Here’s why.
How a Great Blog Strategy Helps B2B Sales
Whether you’re trying to justify a blog to your supervisor or you’re still trying to decide if it’s worth the effort, take a look at all the benefits it provides.
1. Establishes Your Expertise
In B2B sales, your customers don’t tend to make impulse buys. Their purchases will impact their business’s success as well as their professional reputation. They take time and do serious research before they buy. For these types of businesses, it’s crucial that you set yourself apart as an expert in your field. It isn’t enough that you know your specialty forward and backward: you need a way to show customers that you do.
A blog is a perfect way to do this. Write content that provides genuinely valuable information to your customers. Explain things clearly rather than using technical jargon your customers won’t understand.
2. Takes Your Search Engine Optimization to New Heights
One of the most concrete and measurable benefits of a strong blog strategy is its impact on your search engine optimization.
When it comes to SEO, every page on your website is an opportunity to show up on Google search results. Your opportunities are limited if your website only includes product pages because you can’t address specific questions and issues on those pages.
A blog, on the other hand, opens up that opportunity. Your blogs can answer common customer questions or provide insight into topics customers are constantly researching. Above all, make sure you base your blogs on keyword research. Write about frequently searched keywords to get the most bang for your buck.
3. Let’s You Capitalize on Your Video Marketing
By now it’s clear that video marketing is more than a quick trend. For B2B and B2C customers alike, video is often a more desirable way for customers to learn. As this useful article explains, video is a powerful way to produce original content that’s easy to spread across various marketing channels.
You can get even more benefit from this when you post your videos on your blog. In this case, when you share the video on your social media, the link sends users to your site rather than to YouTube. It’s a recipe for higher web traffic and, ultimately, more revenue.
4. Makes for an Easy Sales Process
You’ll see all kinds of advice about how to improve your web traffic. As helpful as these tips are, getting traffic is only half the battle. You also have to convert that traffic into sales.
If you use your blogs well, you can help that along. Within each blog, link to pages where readers can buy your products or services. This guides the customer along to the next stage in your sales funnel. It also makes it easier on them because they can go from researching to buying without missing a beat.
5. Offers an Opportunity to Build Trust
No matter what your field is or who your customers are, people want to buy from someone they trust. This is especially true in B2B sales, where the purchasing decisions tend to have higher stakes.
It’s considered best to write your blogs in a more familiar, conversational tone compared to other web content. This allows your reader to feel like they’re having a person-to-person conversation with you. As a result, customers are able to learn more about who they are and develop trust because they feel like they know you.
6. Gives You a Voice in the Research Process
As we mentioned above, B2B customers tend to research their options well before they buy. The trouble with that from your perspective is that you don’t know what information they’re getting.
If you have minimal content on your website, you don’t have much to offer a customer in terms of research. Chances are that they’ll spend more time on your competitors’ sites hearing about why their product is the best. By having a blog, you give yourself a voice in the research process. You have the opportunity to tell customers the real deal and explain why you’ve designed your products or services the way you have. If you wait until a customer is interested enough in you to contact you with their questions, chances are that they never will.
7. Supports Your Other Marketing Strategies
A strong marketing strategy needs diversity. You can’t build a successful business on billboards alone, or any other marketing tactic for that matter.
One of the reasons a blog is so helpful is because, on top of its own marketing value, it adds value to your other strategies. A strong blog gives you more content to share on your social media pages. It allows you to offer an RSS feed. It gives you more linkable content for your marketing emails. In this way, a blog doesn’t add to your business’s success in a linear way: it’s exponential.
Get to Blogging!
As vital as a blog is for B2C companies, it’s even more vital for a B2B business. Your customers do more research and seek out more content than customers making personal purchases. You need to have the content they’re looking for. At the same time, you need to create your blog strategy with B2B customers in mind. Steer clear of clickbait and focus on genuinely valuable, sought-out topics instead. For more tips for your business, check out more articles on our tech blog.