Effective Blogging Strategies For B2b Businesses

Many business to business companies believe they cannot blog, or if they do maintain a blog that no one will read it. This idea could not be further from the truth! Business to business marketing efforts can be helped a great deal by blogging as long as the blog author follows several strategies to ensure he or she is creating worthwhile content that will be seen by the target audience.

Deciding whether to reevaluate your current blog strategy is worth consideration. Did you just start your blog because a competitor was blogging? Are interns managing the blog content or promotions? Are your blog contributors burned out and have stopped creating engaging posts? Is your audience participating with your blog by commenting on or sharing the posts? These questions should give you a starting point to assess whether your current blog is worth the effort and how to begin reworking it into an effective B2B marketing tool.

If you have realized your current blogging effort could be better or that you are ready to start a brand new blog, here are a few tips to get your content in front of your target audience’s eyes.

• Establish Listening Programs: Most people use social media monitoring only to see what people are saying about their company – and those people are missing a big advantage of social media marketing. Before you can have an effective blog, you need to know what your target audience is talking about online. Use social media monitoring efforts to see what people are saying about your industry and apply that information to your blog posts. Spending a little time to truly understand your target audience will pay off in the end!
• Leverage Your Blog Across All Social Media Outlets: If your company maintains Facebook page or a Twitter account, share your blog posts on each of these outlets. There is an entire audience who is engaging with your company via social media already. If they are interested enough to follow you on Twitter or “Like” you on Facebook, they will want to see your blog.
• Consider Making the Blog Part of Your Site: This decision has its pluses and minuses, but a big plus to an onsite blog is fresh, keyword rich content. Finding new and inventive content for your website can be difficult, but a blog takes care of the problem for you. It will also help establish you as a thought leader among your peers.
• Make a Commitment: You cannot post to the blog once or twice a month and expect it to be successful. Keep your target audiences – and search engine spiders – visiting the blog by posting on a regular basis. This means posting at least once or twice a week. The more you update, the more visits your blog will receive, and you will see a bigger return on your efforts!
• Link Back to Your Website: Your blog offers a great opportunity to create links to your website. Hyperlink keywords in your blog post to products and services pages to increase traffic to these important pages. More links that point to the products and services pages also help those pages to be ranked higher in search engines!

Blogging does not have to be reserved for business to customer entities! Your B2B online marketing efforts can see a huge success by maintaining a successful blog. Follow these tips and you will see your blog traffic – and website traffic – increase before you know it!

By: David Ostendarp

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Rhonda Ryerson, a PR Specialist at TriComB2B, is the author of this article about using blogging as an effective B2B marketing tool, along with B2B advertising, business to business marketing and online B2B marketing. TriComB2B is a Dayton B2B marketing agency that focuses on technical B2B marketing campaigns.