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Building a B2B blogging strategy sounds like too much work. But it’s worth it.
As the products and services in the market advance, how well a brand educates its target audience becomes essential. According to stats, three out of four B2B buyers would rather self-educate than learn about a product from a salesperson.
And it is evident from a survey conducted by Semrush where 97% of respondents said they have a content marketing strategy, with blog posts being the second most successful content format.
Besides creating valuable content to educate potential leads and improve conversion rates, B2B blogging is an excellent way to establish a brand as a thought leader in the market and boost its credibility.
A B2B blogging strategy helps give the direction a company needs in creating quality content that attracts attention. It keeps the content creation focused on the goals a brand wants to achieve.
In this blog, I will share how all types of B2B businesses can create a blogging strategy for marketing success.
Let’s start by understanding the importance of blogging in reaching potential customers.
Why You Need to Start a B2B Blog
Every B2B marketer knows the first step of acquiring quality leads is addressing consumer problems and making them solution aware. Companies use channels like paid advertising, videos, images, and blogs to reach out to the target audience.
But paid marketing presents a limited periphery for sharing valuable information. Also, videos and images are not easy to edit once new customer queries appear. Here, blogs give the maximum freedom to a brand to share its expertise, opinions, and thoughts creatively and create a mark on search engines’ results and social media.
Marketers can update, remove, repurpose, and share the blog pieces to relevant channels and generate a solid online presence. With the right blog post design, consistent blogging adds more pages to your site, offering fresh content and relevant keywords that enhance search engine visibility.
Importance of B2B Blogging Strategy
Blogging about random topics never works. If a company creates content for all its buyers’ personas at once, it will fail to generate leads with high purchase potential.
The same scenario appears when a company don’t differentiate between blog topics of various sales funnel stages. Such blog clusters are more of a liability than an asset to the company as the efforts in creating such result-deprived blogs go to waste.
A B2B blogging strategy puts things into perspective. It allows business owners to focus on a task at a time and create meaningful blogs that cater to the target audience.
Blog posts, unlike paid advertising, provide traffic and leads for years if published with the right content. The traffic can continually grows as well if the blog content gets updated timely. It helps generate more traction without increasing the budget and achieving higher marketing goals.
Here is a fantastic insight into content marketing by venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz:
The Compounding Returns of Content Marketing
The Ultimate B2B Blogging Strategy
Building an effective B2B blogging strategy in a day that generates organic traffic is indeed a challenging task. Brands need to invest in extensive market research to come up with topics that are relevant and content worthy.
Below is the right way marketers can develop a blogging framework to bring in organic traffic and brand awareness.
Step 1: Defining KPIs for B2B Blog Strategy
To measure the success of your B2B blog strategy, it's crucial to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals. These metrics will help you track progress and make data-driven decisions to optimize content performance.
1. Identifying Relevant KPIs such as Traffic, Engagement, and Leads Generated
Some common KPIs for a successful blogging strategy include website traffic, user engagement (e.g., time spent on the page), social media shares, and, most importantly - the number of leads generated.
Monitoring these indicators regularly allows you to identify trends and patterns that inform future content-creation efforts. For example, if certain topics consistently generate more leads than others, consider focusing on those areas in upcoming blog posts.
2. Setting Realistic Targets Based on Industry Benchmarks
- Traffic: Compare your site's monthly unique visitors against competitors or industry averages to set achievable growth targets.
- User Engagement: Analyze average session duration or pages per visit within your niche to establish benchmarks for improvement.
- Social Media Shares: Research popular articles within similar industries using tools like BuzzSumo to determine attainable sharing goals.
- Landing Page Conversion Rates: Review conversion rates from organic search results or paid ads campaigns targeting specific keywords related to your content ideas; use this information when setting lead generation objectives.
Step 2: Understand The Buyers’ POV
Making the customers’ buying journey easier is the prime goal of every brand. So, it becomes crucial to analyse the type of queries, keywords, and topics that target audience search at different sales funnel stages. Creating blogs on frequently searched terms makes it easy for the audience to find solutions to their pain points.
What is the ideal customer’s point of view (POV) at the awareness stage of the funnel is entirely different from when they are at the decision-making stage. A rough understanding of what the buyer has in mind helps generate blog topics that meet prospective customers’ expectations.
A buyer’s journey map visually depicts all the questions and motivations that each buyer persona might have in a sales cycle. Once created, brands can refer to it anytime to get better blog ideas.
Learn to build a buyer’s journey map here:
Step 3: Learning About B2B Blogging Styles
According to reports, approximately seven million blogs get published every day. The blogging sector is highly competitive, and to secure a position at the top SERPs, a blog needs to be creative, remarkable, and unique.
Producing content already on the internet that doesn’t provide new or better information about a topic might get lost in the search results. So, B2B companies keep their blogging strategies fresh and upcoming? Before discussing this question, let’s understand two powerful B2B blogging styles.
1. Pillar Page Technique
A search query that matches a blog section is good, but a whole blog that matches the consumer query is great. The pillar page technique works on the same formula.
Instead of picking up a big blog topic and covering it all in a single post, the pillar page technique aims to break down the topic into several blog posts. B2B Marketers must first decide on a parent topic to start with the pillar page technique.
A parent topic is a broad term that requires the knowledge of many terms, jargon, strategies, tools, etc., to understand it. If marketers want, they can explain the parent topic in a single blog post, resulting in information overload and an overwhelmingly long blog. Some examples of parent topics are: SEO, lead nurturing, lead generation, landing pages, etc.
So to cover vast parent topics, marketer use pillar pages. This technique has two elements:
Pillar Page: It directly discusses the parent topic and summarises every term related to it briefly and simply. This page acts as a comprehensive guide for the parent topic.
Cluster Topics: It revolve around the primary keyword, which is the main topic of a blog. Such blogs deeply explain a term, tool, or strategy related to the parent topic that contains the primary keyword. Marketers can create ‘n’ number of cluster blog posts for a parent topic based on the primary keyword.
For example, say the parent topic is lead nurturing. Then its cluster topics become email campaigns, lead scoring, marketing automation, advantages, challenges, step-by-step implementation strategy, etc.
After creating a rough mind map of the parent topic, marketers can search for relevant keywords and start writing their blogs. As all the topics are interconnected, creating internal links and pushing for stronger SEO becomes easier.
If you want to see how a pillar page looks, then check out this post:
2. 10X Content
Every marketer aims to create unique blog content. But the harsh truth is it is not easy. Creating blog posts already covered by many other websites with no new information to share takes a brand’s traffic nowhere.
In 2015, Rand Fiskin, Co-Founder of SEOMoz and SparkToro, popularised the 10x content technique. It focuses on creating content that reads into Google searches and the intent behind a query. The idea is to create a piece of content 10x better than the SERPs show.
When it said 10x, Rand is not only talking about the copy but also about the visuals it gets published with. Images, videos, designs, page speed, and everything associated with the blog should be 10x the competitors.
Marketers must analyse the top ten search results for their focus blog topic. They should look at the content and the page’s user experience. Whether the blog post is mobile-friendly, what is the quality of writing and information, etc., all such research helps create 10x better B2B blogs.
Though there are other blogging techniques marketers can use, these two are the most popular ones.
Step 4: How to Choose a Blogging Style
Both blogging styles sound amazing. But which one will work best for a B2B brand?
The answer is BOTH.
Pillar page and 10x blog writing techniques complement each other almost perfectly. While the pillar page concentrates on working in-depth on a term through topic clusters and target consumer pain points, 10x content pushes for a fresher presentation and enhances UX.
Both techniques work great for SEO and social purposes. Optimum images and blog writing allows for effortless repurposing, ready to populate a website and social media of a brand with great content.
Marketers must start by focusing on the pillar page and its topic clusters. For every cluster blog post, marketers should create 10x content.
Step 5: Content Marketing Calendar & Consistent Output
- Scheduling blog posts using content calendars and software: Utilize tools like CoSchedule or Trello to plan, schedule, and manage your blog content effectively. These platforms help you visualize upcoming deadlines, track progress on individual pieces, and ensure timely publication.
- Maintaining a balance between long-form articles and shorter updates: While long-form articles are crucial for establishing thought leadership and improving search rankings, it's equally important to include shorter updates that provide valuable information quickly. Striking the right balance ensures readers stay engaged with your content while catering to different stages of the customer journey.
Overall, an effective B2B blog strategy requires a consistent output of high-quality content that provides value to your target audience. By developing a content marketing strategy that aligns with your business objectives and goals, you can establish thought leadership and drive traffic to your website.
Best Blogging Platforms You Should Keep An Eye On
For writing innovative B2B blogs, marketers need to keep up with the best blogging platforms as marketing channels. Though Hubspot and other Martech giants already have a large inventory of blogs, they might not be enough to inspire.
So here are some blogging platforms beginners must follow to learn how to create great content.
a. Medium
Medium is an open platform anyone can share their opinions on anything. Marketing leaders like Rand Fishkin, Larry Kim (Founder of WordStream), and many others are on Medium, which provides unfiltered expert advice and opinions.
From amateurs to experts, all types of writers from different industries are present on this platform. Just find the right leaders of a brand’s target industry and analyse their blog topics and structure to understand how experts write.
b. Vocal
If blog inspiration from Medium is not enough, marketers can jump on to Vocal, where creative people from every field are allowed to express themselves.
One can explore communities and start following the ones that suit their niche.
c. Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers allows marketers to examine open discussions between subject experts and newbies to a target industry. It helps discover the target audience’s pain points and build better content strategies.
As entrepreneurs and business owners actively participate in the discussion, it becomes an excellent opportunity to get insights into a topic or field.
Important Suggestion: Get your Blog Catalog Sheet, which helps to enhance content management and streamlines blog strategy optimization. This tool simplifies the tracking of Calls to Action (CTAs) and aids in pinpointing the ideal stage in the buyer's journey for every post, whether it's at the Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), or Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu).
Build a B2B Blogging Strategy…
Developing a B2B blogging strategy is about creating the right pillar and cluster pages with 10x content. Though it might take more time initially, anyone can become an expert at creating B2B blogging strategies with practice.
It is essential to follow different blogging sites regularly and will keep marketers in touch with trends and what experts are talking about.
As a powerful tool, B2B blogging strategy strengthens the overall effect of your blogs and helps follow an organized approach. It becomes easier for a brand to generate evergreen content, and consumers receive quality content. Start building a B2B blogging strategy to achieve your traffic and conversion goals today.
Once the strategy is set up and blogs get published, ensure to focus on the right blogs to generate leads that can be passed on to the sales team. If you want to learn about blog lead generation, then check out this blog:
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