What is that one thing sales and marketing keep bickering over? You guessed it. It is the quality of leads! High-quality lead generation lays the foundation for a healthy sales pipeline, which imminently trickles down to the company's bottom line. One can say it is the key to any B2B business's success and profitability.
Thae inbound marketing and SEO are delivering proven results for businesses. As a result, brands are churning out blogs, whitepapers, case studies, and interviews to generate high-quality leads. The formula is pretty clear. High-quality content begets high-quality leads.
If you are looking to capitalize on this trend, here are a few tips that will help you crack the code for growing your B2B business using blogs:
Lead Generation Best Practices for your B2B Blog
1. Audit the Existing Content
While it is a given that B2B blogs can help you capture high-quality leads, before you mindlessly churn out fresh content, stop for a moment to review your existing content. Analyze the blogs you have already published across different mediums, their respective performance, and how they fare against your competitors.
Run a full-scale audit that factors in the topic of all the blogs, keywords, ranking, engagement metrics, conversions, etc. Such an assessment will grant you a high-level view of what kind of content your audiences like and which blogs have perfected outreach. Such insights will come in handy later when you align your content strategy with these preferences.
Your marketing team can also conduct surveys to capture reader sentiments or request blog feedback. Such a feedback loop can also show how you can improve your blogs in the long run.
2. Develop a Reliable Content Strategy
Through the content audit exercise detailed above, you may have noticed several content gaps - on your website or in the market. Now that you have done your homework and understood the basics, you can implement your findings to prepare a holistic and well-rounded content strategy.
Understanding your customer's pain points could be an excellent idea for identifying content requirement gaps. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and UberSuggest can shed light on what your target audience is searching for while looking up certain topics. Use these pointers as your inspiration to prioritize the content depending on its demand and impact.
Once you have a list of viable content ready, commence the task of identifying keywords. Consolidate all this information onto a detailed content calendar that outlines the cadence of content publication, along with basic details such as topic name, keywords, date of publication, etc. Based on this schedule, you can maintain consistency while drafting compelling B2B blogs that work as lead magnets.
3. Follow the Best Practices of B2B Blog Development
B2B buyers refer to vendor websites while making a purchase decision. In such a situation, quality could serve as a key differentiator to help your brand stand out. Here is a quick overview of some of the best practices of B2B blog development to keep in mind:
- Decide on the B2B blog's objective even before you start writing it. Is the content being written to educate the audience? Or is it to engage them through value?
- In addition to primary and secondary keywords, incorporate topic cluster keywords in your blogs to account for reader intent.
- Add an attractive CTA to every blog post. After all, the CTA is what draws the leads into your sales funnel!
- Focus on problem-solving rather than rambling about your product or service. Develop the blog such that the reader is the hero while the product/service is the solution to their problem.
- Ensure that the blog is linked to your corporate site or product/service pages to maintain brand consistency.
The above pointers are purely indicative and aimed at getting you started improving your B2B blogs. You will discover more along the way.
4. Focus on Single Value for Every Blog
To elaborate on one point briefly discussed above - B2B blogs should be outcome-based rather than a feature set of your products or services. At the same time, we have already seen how lead generation is the superset of a range of activities. Therefore, the value proposition of every blog should focus on a single and distinct value for it to serve as a USP.
Such an approach eliminates confusion and distraction and offers the reader a clear path on how to proceed. Broadly, the value of any B2B blog can be categorized as reader information, awareness, education, engagement, nurturing, and problem-solving.
Pick a single value from this list and keep that as the primary objective of the blog, and craft a narrative around it. If you were to relay values at any point, you could always kickstart a blogging series or link to a different blog so that your readers are not at a loss of enthusiasm.
Take the HubSpot blog as a living, breathing example of this approach. Each blog published by HubSpot contains nuggets of information hyper-focused on a single value proposition. And every blog concludes with a series of related content recommendations that keep the user hooked.
5. Develop a Content Distribution Strategy
A content distribution strategy makes sense, as those following your social media page or signing up for business newsletters may already be interested in your products and services. Promoting your content amongst such high-quality leads sets the stage for effortless conversion.
Apart from distributing your content on your own, making your content share-worthy is another way to attract readers and capture leads. Once again, it all boils down to the quality of the B2B blogs you publish. Original, high-value, reader-focused blogs are more likely to be shared or linked by other authors.
6. Take a Shot at Guest Blogging
Unfortunately, most B2B brands treat guest blogging as a chore - a trick to snag an author byline or a backlink from some fancy schmancy website. However, it is anything but so. When done right, guest blogging could be your secret weapon to drive traffic, gain authority, and capture leads - all at once!
A classic example of this effect is the stellar rise of the social media management platform — Buffer. Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, propelled the formerly lesser-known startup by writing nearly 150 guest blogs over 9 months. This strategy alone helped them acquire 100,000 users!
Such an example is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the power of guest blogging.
All you need is a compelling idea, a writer or a team with the skill to craft an original blog around it and a high domain authority (DA) website that accepts guest blogs. You can rake in a considerable amount of traffic that converts into leads!
7. Repurpose B2B Blog Content
Blogging is just one part of your inbound marketing strategy. Ideally, the content mix should include other forms of content like videos, infographics, checklists, social media posts, email series, etc. Each form of content serves a specific purpose and comes in handy depending on the target audience, channel, and other variables.
With blogs being the frontrunner amongst all content assets, businesses spend a chunk of their budgets on publishing high-quality content. But then what? Here is where things get interesting - you can repurpose your evergreen B2B blogs into any of the above-mentioned forms.
Repurposing timeless B2B blogs not only works out to be cost-effective but also allows companies to stay on top of their content calendars without fishing for new ideas. Plus, the fact that the blog has performed spectacularly justifies and validates the decision to breathe a new life into it. For instance, you can convert a well-research blog into a gated whitepaper to acquire leads.
Closing Thoughts
The B2B segment has come a long way from in-person meetings and networking at trade shows. Due to the internet's widespread proliferation or the after-effects of a global pandemic, even the most digitally immature B2B businesses have become tech-savvy.
With digital marketing changing the course of B2B marketing, blogs will continue to stay an invaluable asset in every business' arsenal. In fact, HubSpot discovered that businesses that blog report 126% higher lead growth than non-blogging businesses. This figure alone should sign that you need to start B2B blogging if you have not done that already.
Once you get started down this road, the tips, tricks, and insights shared above can help with this endeavor and help you taste success!
