How to Build a B2B Blog That Drives Leads

B2B companies can really benefit from adding a blog into their content marketing strategy.

Whether you’re targeting new business clients or trying to boost your brand awareness, launching a blog and sharing content is a great way to create fresh interest in your B2B company.

But where can one start? What best practices can be followed to ensure that a B2B blog is as accessible, entertaining, valuable, and successful as possible?

If you want to learn everything you need to know about building a B2B blog that really drives leads, this guide will break down the basics along with tips and tricks for success.

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How is a B2B Blog Different From a B2C Blog?

There is actually a big difference between B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) blogs.

A B2C blog doesn’t have to create a consumer relationship in the same way that a B2B blog does. Consumers are quick to make decisions and have a tendency to rely on impulses, and the content that B2C blog creates reflects that knee-jerk reaction.

B2B clients are completely different. Key decision-makers and business owners will need to have a long-term relationship with a B2B company before making a decision, and they can be flighty enough to bail on the sale at any time.

The content that either blog creates will reflect the behavior of their target audiences, which differ significantly.

How to Build the Best B2B Blog for Driving Leads

Identify Your Audience and Buyer Persona

Your userbase, or target audience, is the most important part of your business. The main purpose of creating blog content is to benefit your audience and convert them into actual B2B customers.

Because of this, your content needs to be extremely valuable and offer them something useful.

If your content isn’t valuable and doesn’t connect with your target audience, they simply will not continue along your sales funnel.

To start, make sure that you have created buyer personas for each of your marketing campaigns.

From there, divide them up into subgroups based on things like buyer behavior, location, use case, etc.

Pick 1-2 groups to target with your blog content and write everything in the context of what this group of potential leads is looking for.

By identifying your audience from the get-go, you’ll be able to customize your content and pitch the right article ideas that will meet the demands of this target audience.

For example: If your SaaS company offers communications solutions, you could focus on blog content meant to benefit leads that are looking for texting customer support solutions specifically.

Make Shareable Content

The goal of your blog content is to attract the attention of leads and nudge them down your sales funnel from that point of content.

However, it can be difficult to get your content in front of your target audience from the start. This is why creating shareable content is so important in the context of B2B marketing.

Your content must be educational and solve a particular problem. It should not be sales-focused or read like an advertisement.

Rather, it should be highly valuable and interesting enough for your target audience to share it on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Keep the tone light, conversational, and extremely easy to read and understand.

You should also aim to share your own blog content on your business accounts across all social media channels to get the ball rolling.

You’ll have a much better chance of success with the social media marketing of your blog content.

Invest in the Services of a B2B Lead Generation Company

Launching a blog is the easy part. Creating content that is lead-focused and tested for success is the not-so-easy part.

If your business has the resources available but you lack the time to take on the task yourself, it might be worth your while to look into a B2B lead generation service designed to generate qualified leads through a wide range of practices, including blog content creation.

A third-party professional could significantly help your small business or B2B startup generate qualified leads that are the most likely to create a sale. Through research and analytics, those high-quality leads can be fed blog content that will push them further down your sales funnel.

No business should have to struggle to generate the most qualified B2B leads at scale.

With a little help from professionals, you might just get more out of your blog marketing strategy than you would alone. Just as well, you’ll be able to save time and focus on other aspects of your business.

Be Consistent With Your Publishing

A majority of B2B companies and marketers have a hard time with consistent posting.

However, this really is the key to pulling in valuable leads. It can take a ton of time and a bit of effort to really boost your SEO rankings, which is very important when it comes to lead generation for your blog.

If your blog is only being updated and promoted once a month or so or just inconsistently, you won’t be able to move leads down your sales funnel.

In general, we recommend publishing anywhere from 4 to 6 blog posts per month.

Keep in mind that this content should not be frivolous and lack quality. Rather, the focus should be quality over quantity. You don’t need to post 50 times a month.

Focus on that sweet spot of 1-2 articles per week of quality, valuable, and properly planned content.

It is also beneficial to have a posting schedule established during times of high traffic on your social media accounts. This way, you’ll be able to get your blog content in front of the eyes of your target audience when they are the most active.

Utilize Topic Clusters

If the goal of your B2B blog is to generate leads, then you’ll need to make search engine optimization a priority.

The biggest key to ranking as high as possible on Google once came down to single keywords.

One could easily sprinkle those words throughout their content to boost their search engine rankings.

Now, the Google algorithm is a lot more intelligent and can identify which websites have the best source of information on a given topic.

It all comes down to topic cluster. By having multiple clusters of website pages that focus on a single topic, you’re essentially showing Google’s crawlers that your website is an authority on that subject.

This is especially so if there is a single, long-form, intensive page on the subject, which is known as a pillar page.

The content you write about this subject “clusters” around that pillar page. As we mentioned before, focus on writing a lot of content that focuses on a specific buyer persona and their specific need or use case. You might be surprised by how quickly your SEO rankings will increase by taking the topic cluster approach to blogging.