In the past decade years, B2B blogging has come of age. More than 77 percent of B2B marketers are using blogs to advance their social media marketing strategies. And yet, some companies are still not quite sure what to do with a blog! A quick look at successful B2B blogs — such as Wells Fargo Bank, SAP, Oracle, Oracle, and Caterpillar — will reveal the many benefits.
Here’s are some quick reminders of what a powerful blogging program can do for your B2B marketing:
- Extend the reach of your press releases. When you send out a press release, you’re hoping the right media outlets pick it up and that it somehow gets re-broadcast to your customers, partners, and prospects. When you put that same press release information on your corporate blog, all of your blog subscribers become instant press agents for you — all they have to do is forward the email you’ve sent them.
- Leverage your event and trade show involvement. Your CEO just made a speech at a trade show. If you get the story (and a link to the video) up on your blog the next day, anyone using Google to find new about the CEO, or the speech — or even the trade show — is likely to find your version of the event. And how cool is that?
- Make sure partners, customers, and the media get your important news, good and bad. When your company is in the news, people go right to your blog for the latest information. This is your chance to make sure that the business world hears your side of the story. Give your customers and partners the information they need to make the right decisions for their businesses, whether it’s changing schedules based on a shipping delay or ordering immediately to take advantage of a special offer.
- Make you a go-to source for industry news and thought leadership. Publishing quality content is the best way to position yourself as thought leader, and your blog is the most available place to publish your content. Drilling a SaaS company in the oil and gas industry, using social media and their blog, have been able to position themselves as a premier source of information in the industry.
- Ensure that your products and services rank high in search results. Rigorous SEO keywording, based on a thorough SEO analysis, will eventually move your company’s products and services to the top of the search results. You’ll get there faster if you following blogging best practices that the search companies look for, such as frequency. A neglected blog tends to drift down in many ranking systems because it’s likely to have outdated information.
Your blog content can have an even greater effect if you use the right blogging tools and make it easy for people to follow your blog and to share your posts. Check to make sure that you:
- Have an easy-to-find email-subscription signup on your blog’s sidebar.
- Broadcast new posts to other social media channels. Every time you publish a blog post, a handcrafted excerpt teasing the blog post can be automatically sent to your company’s Twitter stream, LinkedIn page, and Facebook page.
- Install convenient one-click “share” widgets so your visitors can easily share your posts with others via social media channels and email.
- Maintain a blog content schedule to collect ideas, schedule regular posts, and keep track of your in-house contributors and guest bloggers.
- Monitor comments. WordPress and other blogging platforms have features you can use to screen out spam while making sure legitimate comments appear quickly. You can authorize your regular commenters so their comments are published automatically.
Whether you blog for SEO purposes, strategic B2B communication, or both, a B2B blog that offers dependable, valuable content to prospects and customers has proven value for a social media marketing program, especially when using a tool like Oktopost to promote your blog.
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