In the digital age, a whole world of online marketing has opened up, but many B2B software companies are not making full use of the opportunities.
They’re unaware of how content marketing, specifically through running a successful blog, can boost their marketing efforts and ultimately result in conversions for their business.
Providing useful B2B blog posts for prospective customers speaks to the idea of helping them solve their problems first so they can build their trust in your company enough to buy your product.
If you’re ready to take the next actionable steps to boost your marketing strategy with a blog, read on.
Define your blog
This is one of the simplest steps that’s often overlooked.
Define your blog and what it is. Is your blog going to be aimed at B2B audiences or B2C?
The former will focus more on actionable, industry-related posts, while B2C is going to be more about entertainment and engagement for readers.
Your blog should be directly related to your products and services. For example, if you run a technology recruitment software company, your blog can focus on the tech recruitment industry.
Follow a consistent strategy
Before start posting, define your strategy for your blog. What are your aims and how can you achieve them?
The best blogs will provide value for a specific niche audience. For example, if you’re starting a blog for your SaaS knowledge base company, your blog could be aimed at providing audiences with tips and insights into knowledge base best practice.
Decide how often you’re going to post – the more the better, but only produce content at a rate where you can keep it good quality.
This doesn’t you can never change your strategy – in the early days, you’ll be posting just to see what your audiences are most interested in.
You can tweak your strategy to focus more on those posts that receive the most engagement from audiences.
Find your unique voice
You want all of your posts to be in roughly the same tone, and this will be different for every company.
A great discussion of how you can achieve tone in your copy has been published by user experience experts Jakob Nielson on their blog.
For example, many B2B SaaS companies adopt a friendly, down-to-earth, professional tone because they want to be friends with their readers.
This is in contrast to the majority of corporate technology companies, which typically strike a neutral, remote, broadcasting tone.
Target your audience
You must have a specific audience in mind for your blog. If you try to appeal to everyone, then your posts will appeal to no one.
Your audience is most likely going to be the ideal users of your products and services, which you should know. For example, if you are an HR SaaS company, your ideal customers are going to be HR professionals, company founders or CEOs.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking your blog should be all about the technical aspects of your product. People will read about that in your documentation if they need to.
Your blog should deal with the pain points of your target audience, which we’ll cover in the next section.
Produce quality content
You can produce quality content in house if you have the capacity in your marketing team. Many companies employ professional bloggers to support them in the content marketing strategy.
The ideal tactic is to employ bloggers who specialise in your industry niche. For example, I specialise in blogging for tech and startup companies, but also honing in on customer service, SaaS and recruitment.
Your ideal freelance blogger will be unique to your company, but it’s better to reach out to bloggers who already produce content relating to your niche to ensure credibility.
Remember, quality content comes at a price – but it’s totally worth it.
Promote posts online
One of the biggest problems with starting a blog is seeing a low return on investment. This is because of not promoting it enough.
Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not enough to just write a great post, hit publish and hope people will see it. You need to invest time promoting it on a variety of mediums to see results.
Avoid the scattergun approach that’s based more on hope than tactics. Decide in advance what platforms your target audience will be using before you promote.
For tech companies, platforms like Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter are very popular. You need to invest time building up your following on these channels to see traction.
You should also be using search engine optimisation to raise the visibility of your blog – I cover the basics of how to do this in another post.
Don’t forget the power of your own email marketing list – new posts should be going out to your subscribers on a regular basis.
Become part of the blog ecosystem
No one blogs in a vacuum. It’s important to become aware of the blog ecosystem that you’re part of, so you can take note of the posts that are being published by your competitors.
This will help you benchmark against them, give you ideas for new posts on topics that haven’t been covered yet and help you stay relevant.
One way to become embedded in your niche is to guest post for other prominent industry blogs to raise your credibility as an authority blog, but also to improve your SEO rankings with backlinks. Just search for them in Google to see what comes up.
You can also use a quality freelance blogger to guest post for you on other technology blogs.
Up, up and away
I’ve told you everything you need to get started with your blog for your technology business. Define your blog, target an audience, follow a consistent strategy, produce quality content – and promote, promote, promote. Don’t be a stranger, but follow your competitors’ blogs to stay in the loop.
A blog is a worthwhile investment for your business but you must follow these steps to make it a success. As with all marketing strategies, blogging requires time, commitment and financial investment.
I have a lot of experience in writing blog strategies, managing blogs, and producing blog content for B2B technology companies.
If you’d like to find out more about how I can support your marketing strategy and raise your bottom line, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.
