Is blogging worth it for B2B marketers? Here are 12 benefits business to business marketers can gain from blogging.
1. Add value for prospects and customers. Blog posts that include how-to information or provide insightful opinions about your industry serve your audience, create goodwill for your company, and move you away from just selling.
2. Create credibility for your business. If your blog posts are well-written, well-researched, documented and informative, you will gain credibility in your industry and from customers and prospects.
3. Increase “shareability” of your marketing messages. Blogs are designed to allow readers to comment and to share posts on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. This facilitates word of mouth marketing and expands your marketing reach.
4. Keep content on your website fresh and dynamic. Search engines rank website content in part based on how current and new the content is. Frequent blogging – posting of short opinions with lively graphics – keep your site fresh and performing well in search results.
5. Engage with customers, prospects, partners. When your customers and prospects get engaged by commenting on your blog and sharing your information, they are engaging with your company and your brand. Engagement increases customer intimacy.
6. Position you as a thought leader. Once you commit to blogging, you will be forced to find great topics to write about. By writing about trending topics, you are in touch with the pulse of your industry. You can also observe which blog topics that get the most attention – adding to your market research and intelligence.
7. Immediately reach your target audiences. Your blog is a way to respond immediately to issues about your or a competitor’s products or services or important happenings in your community or industry. Within minutes on your blog you can publish a statement and have it broadcast through social media to communicate to your audiences.
8. Crowdsource market research. Instead of or in addition to expensive market research such as focus groups, you can use your blog and social media to get feedback and opinions.
9. Publish information cost-effectively. Blogs are designed for the non-graphic designer, non-programmer to quickly get content published online. They are a very cost-effective way to communicate your marketing messages.
10. Increase content creation for your company. Today shareable content is king. A blog can be the impetus to create marketing content that can be re-purposed into videos, presentations, eBooks, whitepapers and more.
11. Improve performance on search engine results. By blogging about your products and services with the right keywords and phrases in your headlines, image alt tags, blog post URLs, and page content, you can increase your ability to show up high when someone searches for the same terms.
12. Increase inbound links to your site. When you blog and your audience shares your content by linking to it, you increase quality links to your website. The key here is that these are genuine links – not artificial links that some SEO companies contrived to trick the search engines.
What other benefits have you received from your B2B blog? Please comment below.
Do you need help planning, setting up or writing your blog? New Incite provides outsource blog services and consulting – contact us today for more information.
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Our SEO company has been stressing the importance of blogging for our company, but I wanted to do a little research first. You brought up some really interesting points, specifically about gaining credibility with potential clients.
What do you think about using your blog to promote company news as well?
Thanks for the comment. I know that some bloggers use the blog to post press releases and company news, but I don’t like it, in general. Here are my thoughts – press releases belong on a media, news or press page on your website. Announcements about your company, in my opinion, are facts and border on selling because they typically are used to promote your company, products or services. Blogs should not be used for selling, but for adding value to your customers and prospects, or other audiences that are relevant.
Having said that, if you re-purpose and rewrite your press releases and company news and translate in the blog post your opinion about how this news will benefit your readers, I’m OK with that. For example you might explain a new partnership is a sign of a trend in your industry that you believe will only be growing. In other words, you write in the blog what you would tell a customer about your latest news. You’re not selling, just providing the story about your latest news. “We got that customer contract because we have a unique feature and we really connected with the staff at the company.” “We are merging with Company Y to get a head start on what we see as a trend in the industry. Here are the 3 ways our customers will benefit from this merger:…” So, you are not just copying and pasting the press release into the blog post, but re-writing it. That could work. I hope this comment helps!
Thank you for your article!As for me, blogging has improved my logical capability and writing skills .Besides,I also make many new friends through blogging.
Social Media Consultant
You are welcome! I agree, blogging requires that you write well and net out your thoughts in a short post!
Adam, thanks for linking to my blog post on the benefits of blogging for B2B marketers. I liked your post – truly a roadmap for B2B social media.
Nice Post , I am totally impressed with this information I was looking for this for a long time. It was interesting one . Thanks for sharing cheers