Congratulations! You’ve started blogging for your b2b business and have steadfastly been writing on a regular basis. While writing for the blog is fun and exciting, it’s gotten a little hectic given all your other job duties and you’re not seeing the traffic you would have liked. You find yourself wondering, “Why did I decide to do this again?”.
It helps to remember what you’re going to accomplish. You’re blogging for a few reasons and your primary goal is to reach a tipping point.
Reaching this tipping point will:
- Increase online visibility
- Increase readership & credibility
- Ultimately, increase the number of leads generated from your blogging activity.
Reaching these objectives doesn’t happen overnight. Yes, it takes time and requires both a thoughtful approach and high quality content but it isn’t complicated. Blogging successfully isn’t hard if we work smart, consistently improve our efforts and don’t over-think it.
If you prefer encouragement that includes hard numbers, here are a few relevant findings from a recent study on blogging and inbound marketing, conducted by Hubspot.
- B2B companies that blog 1-2 times per month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t.
- An average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50.
- Companies who increase their blogging from 3-5 times per month to 6-8 times per month almost double their leads.
- Leads from inbound marketing cost 61% less than traditional sales leads.
If statistics aren’t your thing, consider the following.
The Top 5 Reasons to Blog for Your B2B Business
1. You’re building relationships.
Blogging engages your audience and potential buyers, building trust through transparency & humanizing your brand. It attracts new readers though organic search (e.g. Google, Bing, etc.), some of whom might be buyers. Others might be investors or potential employees who are considering a relationship with your business. Publishing blog entries supports many types of relationships that are important to a business.
2. You’re investing in your content library.
Blog entries are the building blocks for your content library which is used for nurturing leads who aren’t ready to buy as well as proactively addressing sales barriers through your writing (albeit sometimes indirectly). This content can be reused in ebooks, email campaigns, print articles and other marketing materials. Hence, writing is a valuable investment of your time.
Because your writing is reusable in so many ways, you’re effectively reducing your marketing costs over time because you can pull from your library instead of creating marketing content from scratch. It also becomes much easier & faster to market your business when you can quickly create new ideas from existing content.
3. You are reaching new audiences.
To grow your business, you need to continually talk to new people who have an interest and need for what you offer. Adding new and relevant content on a regular basis creates new opportunities to attract these people from search engines, bringing new opportunities. Granted, building search traffic takes time but there are ways to help short-cut this lengthy process – one way is to selectively syndicate your content.
To syndicate your content, you build relationships with other online publishers by letting them republish your content. Doing so attracts new readers from their audience, builds valuable inbound links and increases your credibility with little extra effort. These other publishers could be other websites, industry associations or even traditional print publishers, if they are agreeable.
4. You are supporting the buying process.
Sales objections and topics of confusion in your industry are great blog topics. Buyers in the research phase often need this information to make a buying decision. If you’re not helping them, your competitor may take the opportunity. These blog entries are also very useful in unifying your company’s messaging on particular topics, helps shorten sales cycles and supports the overall corporate lead generation engine.
5. You’re continually improving your writing.
It’s no secret that great marketers are good writers. The activity of blogging improves your skill as a marketer. As you grow your collection of articles, review the performance of your topics. Which ones attract the most interest? Which articles do readers spend more time reading? Which ones attracted new sales leads & opportunities? Reviewing this information is invaluable because it creates new insight about your audience, helping you continually improve your writing and the effectiveness of your marketing.
Have I missed any benefits of blogging that you’ve experienced? If so, join the conversation by leaving a comment.
