In B2B, a company’s blog serves as its official voice on the Web. Content is needed to make that voice authoritative. Providing helpful, informative content to online visitors will position you as an expert in your space. That fosters relationships and facilitates sales.
Here’s how you can get started creating a strong content marketing strategy:
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Know Your Buyer Personas
First, you’ll need to understand who is out there buying your solutions. Your buyer persona is your distilled wisdom about your ideal customer. It includes things like demographic information as well as their resources, pain points, and constraints.
The key information you need from personas is:
- What burning questions are your potential buyers asking online?
- What business problems are they trying to resolve through search?
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Research Keywords
Once you know what questions are important to your buyers, the next step is to start crystallizing them into content by finding matching keywords. Keywords are the search queries people enter online when they perform a search.
There are many keyword research tools you can use to get started on this process. Your ultimate goal is to figure out the intent behind keywords: some indicate desire to know more about a general topic, while others focus on a specific business question you can address.
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Develop Titles
Most keywords, as people enter them, do not make very good blog topics.
You might see queries like:
- time management software
- time and motion study
- time and a half
Although your content should reflect these exact phrases whenever possible, they don’t do enough on their own to tell you what your content should be about. The title of each blog post should make an implicit promise to a reader that the content delivers on.
You could choose things like:
- “What Should You Look for in Time Management Software?”
- “How Can a Time and Motion Study Improve Productivity?”
- “What is Time and a Half?”
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Write Content
Writing content based on your blog premise gets easier with practice. Remember, your goals are to be helpful, informative, and useful. Each piece of content serves as a preview of the value you have to offer customers. Pour effort into it!
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Promote Your Content
There are countless ways to amplify new content. Your corporate accounts on LinkedIn and other social media should be your first bet. Ideally, your brand will connect with trusted social influencers willing to share and comment on your posts.
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Build Out Your Calendar
Content provides long-term search visibility when you stick with it over months. Adopt repeatable content creation processes along with a content schedule. Consistency is essential to capturing favorable search rankings on target keywords.
Good Web content can generate reliable B2B results – but getting started is the essential first step!
The six tasks mentioned above are all necessary before starting a meaningful content marketing initiative in the B2B world. Taking the time to do these six things, however, can lead to an organic search presence that delivers value time and time again.