Blogging for business offers fantastic potential to enhance your corporate website with a richly engaging platform. Yet a business blog will only convert readers into customers if it offers topical, relevant and useful information and is properly optimised. Invest in a customised blog strategy before jumping in head first, and keep these pointers in mind:
1. Blog about what you know and love
Maintaining a successful b2b blog isn’t easy. It requires commitment, patience, passion and knowhow. If you don’t truly care about what you blog, this will come across in your writing and readers will be instantly turned off. If you’ve decided to create a corporate blog but neither love nor know much about the topic at hand, consider outsourcing content creation. Once your posts are being written by somebody who either knows your topic inside out, or by an expert content writer, your target audience should naturally start to gravitate towards it.
2. Make posts useful
The single most common failure of business blogs is that they are simply not useful. A fantastic b2c blog might be occasionally useful, but a successful b2b blog must always be useful. Appeal to your blog readers’ business interests, which means helping them to solve real business problems. While it may feel that you are being useful by detailing your products, this nearly always compromises genuine helpfulness.
3. Promote your blog
Having well-crafted, useful blog posts is all well and good, but how are you going to attract and retain an audience of targeted prospects to appreciate them? Along with excellent SEO–optimised content, quality inbound links will be a key driver of traffic to any corporate blog. This means determining the key business partners who will happily link from their websites, as well as highlighting your blog in company email signatures, LinkedIn accounts, Twitter and indulging in good old-fashioned word of mouth.
4. Choose social sharing buttons wisely
Poorly performing social media buttons can actually cause more harm than good. Did you know that social buttons are very detrimental to page load speed, particularly on mobile browsers? Don’t be tempted to cling on to every button possible in the hope of that one extra share. We can’t offer a one-size-fits-all social button solution, but the overarching advice is to know your customers and the networks that they frequent. Once you’ve established this, adjust social buttons on your business blog to suit your target audience. LinkedIn and SlideShare are the best performers for b2c sharing according to Help Scout, which used HubSpot to track social shares and conversions in a recent study.
5. Host webinars
We’re noticing a growing trend for webinars in the b2b blogging sphere, and it’s clear to see why. Holding webinars with other thought leaders in your sector offers the following benefits:
1) Positions your business as a thought leader, mover and shaker.
2) Creates powerful, useful video content that your audience can ‘attend’ at their convenience.
3) Enables you to bolster your email list with signed up attendees (with their prior permission).
4) Creates potential for ongoing exposure and engagement on your blog by hosting webinar slides on SlideShare afterwards.
Over to you
What do you think are the most important factors in implementing a successful corporate blog strategy? Please share what is – and perhaps what isn’t working for your b2b blog.
