What if there was one thing you could do weekly that would enhance your company’s visibility, position it as a subject-matter expert and assist your sales team and business development efforts? A strategic approach to a well-constructed blog helps drive brand awareness and allows companies to stand out among their competitors. Once it captures attention, a blog offers stakeholders an exceptional opportunity to interact with your business. As mentioned in “Part I: 3 Steps to Developing the Voice Behind the Brand,” a blog is one of the many channels that can help a brand tell its story. By sharing captivating content, a blog can provide your business with an incredible opportunity to demonstrate its thought leadership and foster trusting relationships over time with clever insights. Below are some of the benefits of developing a B2B blog:
- Blogs Help Keep Brands Fresh Online
When websites are first launched, they look fresh and interesting to search engines; however, over time, rankings slowly fall when sites become stagnant. By consistently adding new content to your company’s blog, you are boosting your website’s ability to be found online. Keeping content fresh is a great way to attract companies using search engines to look for information on specific topics. A great example is ATK’s blog, Inside ATK, which posts relevant, insider content each week. When your blog delivers sought-after information, it becomes a reliable resource customers can trust and prompts them to return again.
- Blogs Position Businesses as the Expert
Blogs offer B2B businesses an additional location to cover interesting information it wants to share. A brand can position itself as a thought leader with expert analysis, industry current events or even video and picture demonstrations. This type of powerful content can generate an extensive reach for your brand. For example, each article on GE Reports, GE’s online magazine, contains pictures and videos, which acquire hundreds of thousands of views and tell stories of the company’s progressive technological abilities.
- Blogs Support Business Sales Teams
When a blog provides fresh and expert content, it can deliver a constant drip of communication to support your sales team. It helps sow seeds for future business and keep clients engaged while landing contracts. Businesses can blog about how to use products in new or different ways, as well as, feature customer success stories, answer initial questions customers may have and help them troubleshoot potential complications. Employment Blawg of Manpower Group does this with an active labor and employment law blog, illustrating expertise and their audiences’ need for their services. Ultimately, these three elements work together to reinforce your company’s brands and keep top-of-mind awareness among audiences. By strategically utilizing SEO and developing valuable content for their audiences, B2B companies can reap these benefits of blogging. The DOs and DON’Ts of Blogging DO:
- Set objectives for your blog: Help your company meet its organizational goals with each post.
- Incite readers with an accurate title: Describe the article and include a subject and verb.
- Generate purpose-driven content: Establish your blog as a reputable resource.
- Encourage stakeholders: Prompt viewers to share your blog through your company’s social media accounts.
- Include keywords: Attract your target audience to your blog from search engines.
DON’T:
- Plagiarize others’ work: Provide credit for quotes, photos and videos to build your blog’s credibility.
- Write too much: Large slabs of text scare away readers and long paragraphs will lose your audience’s attention.
- Keep your audience guessing: Let them know in the first two sentences what your blog post will discuss.
- Worry about formality: Blogs should be more casual, while still emulating your stakeholders’ language.
- Forget about graphics and media: Include images or video that features your subject to draw attention from your audience.
