B2B Blogging Best Practices

We’ve talked at length here about the importance of blogging for a business. You know you should start a corporate blog, but you don’t know where to start. You may even have a list of ideas that could be turned into blog posts. But every time you sit down to write, your mind goes blank or you just keep putting it off. Let me tell you – that blog won’t write itself, and you’re only hurting your business’s prospects by neglecting to write one. And hey, this is a chance for you to show off to your clients! Your blog is a great way to show them that you’re operating at a high level, beyond the top-level copy of your website.

Building a great blogging platform isn't optional; it's imperative for any business looking to use its website as a marketing tool.It makes your website easier to search, easier to index -- and when done right, generates leads who never would have engaged with your brand to begin with. So getting a great corporate blog going for yiur content marketing plan is a smart business decision no matter your industry.

Here are some tips to help you get started:

Know your audience

Knowing who you’re blogging for is the first step to writing a successful blog. Start by doing research on what your competitors are writing about. If you’ve already developed buyer personas, use them to dictate what your audience will find interesting. If you don’t already have buyer personas, make some! If you don’t know who your audience is, then you don’t know who your customers are, and that means you won’t be able to market your company effectively.

Create a strategy

Embarking on a project without any sort of plan is a recipe for failure. An effective starting point is to write down the list of ideas you have bouncing around in your head. Then, devise a strategy that involves how these ideas work together. Remember to create a coherent voice that runs throughout your blog and ensures that you’re courting your entire customer base.

Be relatable

Professional writing used to be stuffy and staid no matter the industry. But that’s not the case anymore, and your blog is a place for you to use your personal, passionate, and relatable voice. Just make sure it matches the way you’re already speaking with your clients. If you’re in an industry where you’re able to be more informal with clients, you should be informal online. But, if you’re in an industry that expects to be using formal language and signals authority through reserve, be sure to use similiar language and a tone that won’t alienate those clients.

Fact Check

Speaking of alienating, 94% of people polled for this blog post said they wouldn’t trust a writer if the statistics and facts presented to them were false. Okay, so I made up that statistic, but the idea is absolutely true. It’s important to use statistics in your writing – but it’s equally important to make sure those statistics are true. It only takes one Google search to ruin your credibility forever.

Proofread More Than Once

First, scan for typos. Not only are typos ugly and unprofessional, they can really hurt your credibility as a company, causing people to call your education into question. Proofread your work to refine your writing and make sure there are no dangling sentences, overused words, or odd phrases. Then put your work away and come back to it again after you’ve been looking at something else for a while – and do it again. You’ve put the time and effort into developing your blog, so the last thing you want is to hurt your credibility with careless errors.

And remember, your B2B Blog isn’t meant to be clever or funny like your Twitter or Facebook posts. The goal is show your business acumen to potential clients and create leads through topics that show your mastery of the industry.  Your blog is a great place for you to demonstrate how well you do what you do. With practice, crafting an intelligent blog won’t seem so daunting. 

Now close your Facebook tab and get to work.

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