I struggle with coming up with blog post ideas. Through the course of the day, dozens of ideas fly in and out of my head, but when I sit down to actually blog, I draw a blank. Fortunately, as I was trolling for ideas, I stumbled onto something helpful to me AND pertinent to demand generation! Check out this post from HubSpot with a helpful infographic and some ideas on blog post ideas.
46 percent of people read blogs more than once a day (HubSpot Science of Blogging 2010). If you’re distrustful of that stat because it’s a few years old, WordPress tracks readership of blogs on their platform. According to their stats, more than 409 million people view more than 14.7 billion pages per month! (It has a pretty cool map of real time activity as well). If you think blog readership is limited to young people, think again! According to Pingdom, the top blogs’ readership average age is 38 years old. All of which helps drive home the point that blogging is a great tool for lead generation for Business to Business marketing.
But why should you blog? Here are my five top reasons to start a B2B blog:
- It allows you the opportunity to position yourself as a thought leader. A blog lets you talk about your industry issues and how you solve those problems without giving a “sales pitch.” In turn, that thought leadership proves your value as a partner to potential customers. Focusing on what you know helps create an educated consumer.
- Your blog allows your potential customers the opportunity to educate themselves. Gone are the days where potential clients come to you knowing nothing about the products or services you offer. The Internet allows consumers a level of education never seen before. You have two choices: You can choose to be frightened by that. Or you can embrace the notion that more educated consumers are farther along the sales cycle, enabling you and your sales team to focus on why your product or service is best for their problems, instead of explaining to them what you think their problems are.
- Blogging helps drive traffic to your site. Frequent blog posts (you should aim for one post per week at 600 words for best results) helps drive up your SEO rankings, especially if you take the time to plan an editorial calendar with key search concepts. Focusing on long-tail key word strategies from the start helps drive relevant traffic to your site.
- Your blog posts can target your personas and their pain points. If, like most businesses, you are selling to a variety of personas and roles, you know how hard it is to make the content on your blog answer the questions of each unique persona. Blog posts let you focus on specific personas and their specific pain points, which help them find the information they need to make informed decisions.
- Blog posts can help funnel the readers to other valuable content on your website. In case you think all that content is now “useless,” it is not. Your blog can help push people to the existing resources and content they need but didn’t know existed before your blog post. So instead of forcing them to find things they don’t know they’re looking for, you can use relevant calls to action (CTAs) to guide them through the content that will help them learn about your company.
What are your blogging challenges? Or, what success have you found?