B2C Blogging Best Practices

Everyone’s been there; you’re surfing Facebook and suddenly you start seeing everyone posting a video or about “feels” or “truth.” So you click to watch, only to discover it’s actually a well-crafted, feel-good advertisement for soap and not, in fact, an in-depth exploration about how women perceive their own beauty. And yet, you were moved by the story in the video; you rooted for the subjects, connected with them, empathized with them – and it was a soap company that gave you that experience.

What made it so effective wasn’t the soap: it was you. That advertisement focused on you, the potential consumer of a simple bar of soap, and made you feel positively about yourself and about other people, which you now associate with that soap company. 

Traditional advertising would have focused on how beautiful and wonderful the soap makes people feel, but instead the advertisers gave the women in the video the chance to feel great about themselves, and gave us the chance to witness and join in that idea of being a complete and worthy person. It was never about soap. It’s about the brand.

That particular campaign may have been a series of videos, but B2C blogging runs on the same principles. The customer’s feelings of relevance, image, and self-importance need to come before the relevance, image, or importance of any particular product or service.  B2C blogs aren’t about proving how smart you are, but instead about winning the attention and the affection of potential customers. 

That’s why blogs that are filled with recipes and how-to tips are more popular than blogs that are a series of glorified press releases: blog posts that put the customer experience front and center will always trump posts about how great your company is.  Recipes, how-to’s and pretty pictures all help push the aspirational life of your customers into reality, even if seasonal cocktail recipes have nothing to do with your line of clothing.

The point of a B2C blog content marketing strategy is to engage with your customers on a personal level in the same way that you engage with them on social media. On social media, you encourage them when they praise your business, commiserate when they complain, and most of all, keep them looking at your company and liking your activity by providing content they want to see – all while educating them about the services you provide. B2C blogging is the long-form version of that ideal.

Instead of providing links to articles and retweets of interesting stuff, create your own content about new technology or progress in the field, and end with how it relates to the customer. When you do write about a product or a service you provide be sure to bring it back around to reflect how it helps the customer and how it will change their image or make them feel once they’ve bought it (from you, of course).

In other words, what B2C does is give you the chance to sell, not just the need for the product, or the product itself, but the reason to get that product from you. It’s about building brand associations, something for consumers to connect with emotionally. Because, after all, when it comes down to it, are you going to buy the soap that promotes healthy body images, or are you going to buy the soap that doesn’t?

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