Blogging was the first of the new wave of Internet technologies to move into the business mainstream. Previously the realm of hobbyists and then journalists, businesses began adopting blogging in a big way from 2009/2010. Despite the overwhelming growth of blogging since, to the extent where a majority of businesses have at least some kind of blog presence, many companies still fail to reap the rewards of blogging as a B2B lead generation tool. Why is this? There are three major factors that contribute to making a business blog successful. Success at lead generation depends largely on how these are implemented.
Your blog is not a stand-alone product. It is rather an extension of your company website. It should therefore resonate with your brand. Free blog services are popular with some businesses and they usually come with a selection of attractive templates. The problem is that these templates are not designed to sync with your website, so visitors to your blog and site won’t see a connection in branding between the two. It is worth working with a web development team to adopt a unified approach to your blog and website, so the imagery, colours and feel are the same.
To be successful as a business blogger you have to make blogging part of the DNA of your company. It has to come across as genuine, that you enjoy blogging and that it expresses something about the ethos of your company. Prospects will respond to this genuine approach with reciprocal warmth. A regular blog shows a passion for your industry, product knowledge and a commitment to long-term growth. It shows a business that is thriving and open for expansion.
Regular is the key word here. Of the tens of thousands of business blogs in the UK, a significant number of them are not updated frequently. Prospects flock to and subscribe to blogs that are updated on a weekly or even daily basis. Blogs that are rarely updated or have only half-hearted articles are lonely places. Seeing this, a prospect is not going to be inspired to get in touch, and worse, they may even think you’ve gone out of business if your blog hasn’t been updated for a long time. Google likes blogs too. If you are interested in increasing your search position, then blogs are an easy and inexpensive way of going about it. Google’s search robots see an active blog with regular content updates as sign of a vital and authoritative website. They will reward you by ranking you accordingly.
Have you ever visited the blog of a company and found an endless succession of Christmas party photos, promotions and press releases? Is your own blog guilty of this? Yawn, yawn, yawn.
If you use your blog solely as a company news forum, then you are unlikely to gain many new readers. You are better off using something like Facebook for this. A blog isn’t primarily a news page, but is more like a magazine. You have plenty of good industry knowledge and experience. Share it with your prospects through your blog articles. Identify the problems that bring customers to your door and use blog articles to help solve them. Reading these, your prospects will know that your business is someone they can rely on to address their needs.
Your blog content should be weighted to 85% customer focused material and only 15% self-promotional writing.
The problem facing many businesses is that blogging takes time. A 500 word blog post can easily take several hours for someone to create if they are not familiar with web copywriting. The thousands of neglected blogs online are as often due to lack of time as they are to lack of commitment. To make blogging work as a B2B lead generation tool, you need the resources and commitment to see it through.
If you don’t have this in-house, as many businesses don’t, marketing agencies such as JDR can help. Our professional copywriting team have the marketing knowledge to identify the type of content that works best for your business, and the resources to create regular, high quality articles. For more information about how to use blogging as part of a marketing strategy, please get in touch for a chat with one of our marketing specialists.