Whatever form of marketing you’re involved with, blogging is an amazingly profitable part of your marketing campaign, and it’s no different in B2B marketing. The benefits of blogging are huge if you know how to do it right. Here are a few ways to ensure that blogging contributes to your B2B marketing campaign.
How Blogging Benefits B2B and Other Marketing Types
Blogging is first of all a way to keep visitors coming to your B2B website. Most people, regardless of whether they’re active in your niche or merely curious, want to see that there will be something new when they come back. If they see no signs of fresh content coming, they simply won’t come back, and you lose an unguessed at number of opportunities to engage them, sell to them, form partnerships and so many other possibilities. If you seriously want them to keep coming back for more, blogging gives them a good reason to return.
A second, but no less important benefit of blogging is for the SEO benefits. Search engines love blogs, and will reward websites that have well-maintained blogs. Additionally, if your content is truly engaging to your targeted traffic, your blog posts can go viral and draw even more traffic to your website, which the search engines also notice when they calculate page rankings.
Content Marketing Demands Dynamic Content
Blogging is a great way to provide dynamic content to your business’ website, and as such is a cornerstone for a successful content marketing strategy. Dynamic content is a great way to keep the search engines’ attention, and blogging is the most elegant solution to the problem of having it for nearly every business. As you can probably surmise, getting this kind of love from the search engines means that your ranking on the SERP pages will rise all the more quickly.
Besides keeping the attention of the search engines, blogging is also a great way to keep the attention of possible clients and business partners. If visitors are made aware that you will continually be adding new content, especially industry-related blog posts, you can expect that a good percentage will keep coming back. Of course, it also helps to have an RSS feed button on the blog and a solid social media campaign to keep attracting people from places like Twitter and Facebook to your blog.
With That Said, You Need Quality Content
Of course, keeping a blog effective as a marketing strategy means that you have to keep feeding it QUALITY content. Simply put, if you want people to keep coming back for more, you have to keep the posts interesting and informative. Otherwise, your RSS feeds and social media links are going to become less and less effective as ways to drive traffic to your website.
For one thing, you can’t simply churn out the same material and subject matter. Granted, you will eventually come back around to the same subjects repeatedly, but there are ways to do this that will keep visitors interested. First of all, you don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) blog every day. Twice a week is a perfectly fine rate to keep visitors and the search engines captive, and any more than three will simply not count toward winning the love of the search engines.
Secondly, there is surely enough to blog about in your particular niche that you can cycle through the different subjects without coming back to the same stuff you’ve already blogged about 6 weeks ago. Also, staying on top of the trends and changes in your niche will surely keep your blog fed with completely new material. By the time you get back around to the subjects that you’ve already blogged on, your readers should have already forgotten about it, and at any rate, you may have gained new insights and perspectives in the subject by then.
Brandon W is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch