With content marketing on the rise, blogging is an integral component of any marketing strategy—especially for business to business.

According to Simple Marketing Now:

• Blogging businesses receive twice as much e-mail traffic than their non-blogging counterparts.
• Company websites receive a whopping 97 percent higher inbound link rate when they have an ongoing blog.
• Businesses discovered that blogging had better cost-efficiency than traditional lead generation techniques. (It's less expensive AND brings in more qualified leads.)

That said, if you have yet to consider blogging for your company, it’s about time you start!

Why Blogging is the Best B2B Business Development Tactic

We’ve briefly discussed statistics that show how better B2B business development can arise from the simple act of blogging, but what exactly can it do for your business?

Converts more leads

Did you know that company websites with blogs generate 67 percent higher leads on average? Probably not; otherwise you wouldn't be here!

In all seriousness, converting more leads is what you want right? But how do you do this? By incorporating a call to action (CTA) within each blog article – typically towards the end of the post to not appear spammy.

If readers of your blog like your content, they just might act on your CTA, helping you bring in leads quicker than you would without a blog. It’s a great way to get more moola. (Wow, sounds so easy, right?)

Builds customer loyalty

Bringing in new customers isn’t always an easy task, but with B2B blogging, you can both bring in customers and ensure you keep them coming back.

The thing with blogs is that they are more personal. If you had a personal Blogger or a Tumblr back in the day (or still do; I won’t judge), you’ve probably spilled all your deepest, darkest secrets plus more.

Let’s face it, people are snoopy. They like getting personal, and at times, a little vulnerable. While company blogging doesn’t need to be so personal that you delve into the lives of your employees, what you can accomplish is a sense of humanity. Consumers often forget that behind every company is a human being.

Giving consumers a little behind-the-scenes or freebie tips and hacks, tutorials, or other content in your blog articles can help bind them to your business and even like you a bit more as a person. People get attached but mainly when there’s humanistic qualities to get attached to (e.g., sharing, relating to consumers, etc.)

Establishes authority

Part of a good business is having educated employees, but with blogs, you can also prove your authority. This is important as many company websites are fairly vague and to-the-point, but with blog articles, you can expand on what you do, what you know, and why others need to turn to your business.

Being authoritative in blog posts revolves around using statistics, studies, and other reliable sources to educate consumers.

When you use the latter, guess what consumers think about your business? Something that they can trust. As a bonus, using facts, quotes, statistics, and the like in blog articles can strategically lure in customers to opt for your service and/or product(s) as it makes it clearer to them why what you offer is important and that it is in fact backed up by evidence.

This is especially key when working in the B2B space. When you're selling to businesses, they have a lot on the line, so you have to prove you are worth their time, energy, and money.

Becoming an SEO Genius

As much as you probably want to roll your eyes at the thought of using search engine optimization (SEO) in your company’s blogs, SEO can help you reach your marketing goals. SEO isn't what it used to be; no longer does it mean keyword stuffing your post to the point that it makes no sense to human readers. It's evolved significantly and brings the right readers to your website if you're doing it right.

Not optimizing your posts won’t bring you the traffic you want (and honestly, that sucks). Utilizing the right keywords is crucial. Apart from this, implementing them naturally and throughout the post (title, introduction, headings, subheadings, body, etc.) will assist you in achieving a stronger search engine ranking.

As a friendly word of advice before you begin the SEO process, don’t keyword stuff unless you want a lower ranking on Google, and don’t pick keywords that cannot be naturally used (e.g., “seafood restaurant cheap” versus “cheap seafood restaurant”)

Making Content Matter

Turning crickets in crowds through B2B blogging sounds impossible, but it’s not. Part of making your content matter is 1) making it worthy enough to read and 2) getting it out there.

To make your content attractive, you can do something as little as picking an attractive font, sticking to shorter paragraphs, selecting the right title, focusing on quality, and getting more in-depth with the topic you’re writing about.

More importantly, making content matter lies within actually getting your content out there. You can have the best blog article in the world, but if nobody sees it, it’s not worth anything. Besides relying on SEO, you can use newsletters and e-mails, social media posts, and guest posts to get your blog articles to be noticed.

If getting down the right marketing strategy is difficult, time-consuming, or simply uninteresting for you, leave it to our team at Slanted Content + Design to do the work for you.

Contact us today to see how we can help you develop and implement a comprehensive content strategy for your business.