Being a B2B marketer isn’t easy. Being a blogger isn’t easy, either.
I started blogging in 2004 and began B2B blogging in 2018. While it has been an amazing journey, it hasn’t always been easy.
So here are 10 B2B best practices that are almost guaranteed to help you grow your business faster.
Define your goals
Before embarking on any content marketing strategy, you need to define your goals.
Do you want to generate leads, produce more sales, increase brand awareness? Whatever you consider a conversion, now is the time to decide on what it needs to be.
Different types of content will speak to website visitors differently, depending on their stage of the journey.
For example, blog content that addresses informational search queries needs to different than content that targets high buyer-intent queries.
The best way to get started is by identifying your target audience and what they care about most at each stage of the inbound marketing funnel.
Choose Your Keywords
It’s important to know what terms people use when searching for information, which means you need to pay close attention to keyword search volume and keyword difficulty score.
In digital marketing, choosing the right keywords is a balancing act.
First, it comes down to two things: targeting keywords that have enough interest, or search volume, to make them worth your while. And secondly, targeting keywords that are not too competitive so you have a chance of ranking for them.
I have more articles about keyword research here and here.
Have promotion built-in to your content
Before you create any blog content, you must know how and where it will be promoted.
This includes search engines, email—social media, and Paid Per Click (PPC) search ads.
You need to have an idea of your headline, email subject line, social media image, etc.
You should also have an idea of what articles your content will link to and which ones will link to it.
While there are many different avenues to promote good content on the web today, you must plan ahead in order for it to be effective. This means creating a detailed marketing campaign before you create any content.
This post will walk you through creating a content workflow, which will show you how to create a content marketing matrix.
Publish Consistently
You should be posting new articles at least once a week on your blog. More if you can.
You can still take breaks or skip a week if needed, but the more often you publish content, the better your chance of ranking higher in search engines.
Being consistent will pay off here.
Google has an algorithm that rewards consistency. The more often you publish new content, the more frequently Google will crawl your website.
If Google sees your website as a credible source of new content, it will reward your website in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Craft A Strong Headline
Your blog post headline is one of the more crucial aspects of your content.
Writing a good headline is relatively straightforward with the right formula.
For example: “7 Ways To Lose Weight Without A Fad Diet”.
This formula looks like this: [Number] Ways To [Benefit] Without [Obstacle].
And ‘how to’ headlines have always been proven to work.
For example: “How To Make Fluffy Pancakes” or “The Benefits Of Eating Organic.”
You want the headline to be descriptive and concise while also enticing people’s interest. This will help you get more views from users who are likely to click through on an interesting title.
Optimize content for search engines
Search engines will be one of your most reliable sources of traffic.
That means your SEO strategy should be based around content that’s optimized to rank for your chosen keywords.
Optimization falls into two main camps; on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is everything you can control; the content, your website, internal link structures, etc.
Off-page SEO is largely the things you cannot control – like backlinks from other websites.
I have an article on SEO here.
Have A call to action
Every piece of content you produce, from blogs to emails to social media updates, every marketing message needs a call to action.
A call to action is what your reader does next, and it can be almost anything from “sign-up for our newsletter” to “click here to buy.”
Creating a campaign with goals in mind will help you decide which type of call to action will work best.
For me, lead generation is one of the most important components of my business. So many blog posts ask readers to become email subscribers.
You could entice people to subscribe to your email list by offering exclusive content.
For example, if you’re writing about productivity in the workplace and how best practices on time management are helping companies stay competitively fresh, send out weekly tips, blog posts, or videos.
Repurpose your content
Repurposing your content is a smart way to get more from less.
You get more content from less work.
One way to repurpose your content is to take your blog post and turn it into a video by either reading it on camera or as an explainer video with a voice-over.
You can take this a step further by extracting the audio track and turning that into a podcast.
Now you have three pieces of content from one blog post.
This gives you more marketing channels to promote your content, though, and potentially grow an audience faster.
Promote your content
Promoting your content has never been easier. Right now, we have multiple marketing channels and can get instant access to hundreds and thousands of visitors at the click of a button.
Your first port of call should be social media marketing. Creating branded social media profiles and pages should be done in advance before you publish anything on your blog.
Email is another one of my favorite marketing channels.
As I mentioned previously, your email list will become your most powerful source of traffic.
It also makes sense to have an outreach campaign in place.
This will allow you to contact bloggers, journalists, and influencers who would be interested in sharing your content with their audience.
Track Your Results
It’s vital to keep an eye on your results so you can see what’s working and what doesn’t.
The secret to successful marketing is simple; find out what works and do more of it.
Thankfully, we have a couple of free tools that make things easy for us.
Google Analytics is one of the best free ones; it provides detailed information about your site’s traffic sources and engagement rates, which will enable you to identify new opportunities.
Google Search Console is another tool to check out.
It provides a number of insights about the performance and quality of your sites, such as crawl errors or indexing problems. It will also allow you to submit XML sitemaps for Google search engine crawling so that it can find more content on your site.
Conclusion
These B2B blog best practices are designed to help you improve your content creation efforts, gain website visitors faster, and convert them into customers.
By creating content on a frequent basis, strategically promoting that content, and monitoring the results, you should be able to create a successful blog.