Practical B2B Blog Strategy

If you’ve put your energies into building a community that engages with your B2B blog but aren’t seeing the kind of conversions you (or your boss) are looking for you might want to back up a little and re-examine your B2B blog strategy.

Common wisdom suggests that:

publishing conversational posts

engaging with your audience

cross-promoting on all the relevant social media channels

having a professional blog theme

and working with keywords and search engine optimization

will give you the best shot at success.

But at the end of the day success in the B2B sphere isn’t about conversations and engagement: it’s about sales.

Don’t Let Your Focus Wander

The “engage, start a conversation” mantra that seems to be doing the rounds at the moment might be a bit misleading from a B2B perspective. Especially when studies suggest that the overwhelming majority of visitors to a B2B blog are first timers.

If that’s the case, then to kick start your B2B blog and improve your conversion rates you need to stop thinking less about conversation and engagement for a moment, and more about:

• generating targeted traffic
• ensuring your site has awesome call-to-actions
• and easily navigated links to well-constructed squeeze pages.

Targeted Traffic

One way to go about this is arguably to spend some of that marketing budget on Google’s sponsored links. This is particularly useful if your business is targeting local traffic because it keep those wasteful (and potentially expensive!) clicks down.

The more common approach, and one I personally recommend, is search engine optimization coupled with a well thought out keyword phrase campaign. And here I don’t mean guessing what your target audience might be clicking for but really investing time and energy into working out just what the most profitable and attainable keyword phrases really are.

Once you’ve got this sorted, you can set about planning your blog schedule for the coming month around those keywords and then figuring out how to make those posts engaging and appealing to your audience.

Call-to-Actions

If, as Marketo’s study (PDF) from earlier this year suggests, that 92% of buyers use search to begin the buying process then it’s probably worthwhile to think of blogs as a storefront:

The visitor clicks through from Google (or an integrated social media campaign, say, from a link on Twitter) giving you a few moments to capture their attention and funnel them to your squeeze page.

Because the design of blogs hasn’t really developed that much from their first appearance on the scene, that means you’ve only really have the sidebar, header or post content to grab your audience’s attention.

This is where A/B testing is an imperative part of your B2B blog’s first steps towards success. It’s not just about producing great blog posts; it’s also about ensuring that your call-to-actions are seen and acted upon.

So What’s the Best Approach for B2B blog success?

Before continuing to put energy and resources into building B2B blog conversations and engagement, figure out the best way to maximise targeted traffic to your site. Spend time and resources discovering well-chosen keyword phrases and make sure your website is optimized for SEO.

Then ensure that you’ve got a process in place that assesses the conversions you’re getting from that traffic, running A/B tests over a period of time to tweak your site.

Takeaways

With targeted traffic and optimised call-to-actions all wrapped up in some great site design, finally integrated with an engaging, conversational tone of writing and a social media strategy to cross-promote your posts, you should be firmly on track to B2B blog success!

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About The B2Bblogger: Jon Buscall is managing director of Jontus Media, an online content marketing agency in Stockholm, Sweden. You can follow him on Twitter @jonbuscall and @jontusmedia.