B2B Blogging Strategy For Small Businesses: 5 Questions To Answer As You Build Your Strategy

It’s a little abnormal for many small businesses to have a B2B blogging strategy.

Most small brands in the enterprise space don’t believe that blogging is an effective use of their time.

However, that couldn’t be more incorrect.

Blogging is a huge asset for B2B companies to add to their content marketing strategy.

A great blog is at the core of your SEO, it demonstrates your knowledge of your industry, and it helps build trust with your audience.

To ignore blogging, as many small B2B companies do, is a mistake that won’t be easy to recover from.

So, rather than make that mistake, you need to develop a B2B blogging strategy that can reach your ideal customers and start building a great incoming lead flow for your brand.

Your strategy must encompass everything important about a blog without wasting any of your efforts.

You need a blog strategy for your small B2B business whether you realize it or not. Click To Tweet

That’s not particularly easy to do unless you know what you’re getting into and how to go about making it happen.

B2B blogging strategies can be complex when you’re unclear about what you should be doing.

Small business owners regularly get frustrated with a blogging strategy after just a few articles, often because they’re not getting the results they expect.

But that failure is due to mismanaged expectations of what a blog strategy is capable of.

Instead of allowing you to go in unprepared, I’m here to help you build your B2B blogging strategy successfully.

I’m going to cover everything you need to think about as you develop the right strategy for your business to grow in the B2B world.

Developing A B2B Blogging Strategy Needs To Start With The Right Expectations

Today, too many businesses are looking for a fast solution to bring in new clients and grow their brands.

Perhaps it’s got something to do with the self-perpetuating nature of looking for results now without thinking about the long-term results.

It reminds me of the fable of the grasshopper and the ants.

If you’re not preparing now to get leads and earn customers in the future you’re always going to worry where your next customer will come from.

Your B2B blogging strategy is designed to help with that long-term plan to earn customers.

There will not be huge results early in the execution phase and expecting there to be will only frustrate you.

The results of blogging don’t come quickly. Click To Tweet

When you choose a strategy like B2B blogging, you need to plan for the results to take time to grow.

While early, minimal results are possible, the ones you’re looking for must be built to.

Patience is your best friend as you pursue this path, and it pays off in spades if you’re willing to do it correctly.

Creating long-form blog articles will help increase the number of leads you get by as much as 900%.

Imagine how much less worry you’d have about where your next sale was going to come from!

But if you don’t have the patience to keep working at it before the results come in, you’ll become discouraged before you get there, turning this process into a waste of your time.

Instead, start with the correct expectations and plan on putting in a lot of work before you see the results.

These Questions Will Help You Build Your B2B Blogging Strategy

Blogging is an excellent strategy for B2B businesses.

It’s a great way to prove your brand’s expertise in your field, provides a supreme boost to your SEO efforts, and builds trust with your target audience.

Plus, it offers huge benefits to your lead nurturing process, offering leads more of the right information during the right phase of their buyer’s journey.

However, you can’t simply jump into your B2B blogging without a strategy.

Any marketing effort that begins without a strategy is doomed to fail, or at least float around in purgatory with no direction it’s supposed to take your brand.

Those marketing efforts that occur with no strategy become a drain on money and time, as you have no idea if they were successful because you didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

So, starting with a solid B2B blogging strategy to execute is the most logical stance for your small business.

Done right, you can create more traffic for your brand through your blog.

I feel like that’s ultimately what we’re all trying to do, especially if we know our website will effectively convert qualified site visitors into leads.

Simply adding more traffic to a working system like that will guarantee an increase in leads and, therefore, sales.

With that in mind, let’s talk about building a successful B2B blogging strategy.

Think about your answers to the following questions as you walk through developing your strategy.

They’ll guide you in the right direction.

What Is The Purpose Of Your B2B Blog?

The first thing you need to know to make B2B blogging success for your small business is what you will be trying to achieve with your blog.

Every marketing strategy, and every component of it, needs a goal.

Without a goal, you’ll never know whether you were successful in that arena.

Think about the reason you’re creating a blog and writing weekly to daily articles for it.

There are plenty of outcomes and purposes you could consider.

For example, you might use your blog to generate brand awareness, letting people know that you exist and what you can do for them.

Or you might want your blog to focus on drawing in qualified website visitors that it will help you convert to leads through your website.

Knowing the overall purpose of your B2B blogging strategy will guide the decisions you make along the way, both in creating your strategy and in producing your articles.

You’ll also help answer some of the other questions right off the bat.

To answer this question, consider the overall goal that your B2B business has and think about how your blogging strategy can help get it done.

If you want to move people from knowing who you are to feeling good about your company and offering, use your blog to help your audience see the value in your company.

Offering more information through education and entertainment with the addition of calls-to-action and other similar elements allows your audience to get familiar with your brand.

Once you know the purpose of your brand, you can start carving the path to the goal.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

When you write articles, you’ll be targeting a certain cross-section of your target market.

Known as buyer personas, these cross-sections are representations of your perfect customers.

Each of them connects differently with content, and your blog articles are no exception.

Keeping them in mind as you tackle your B2B blogging strategy, you need a certain angle to help you reach them.

Focus on your B2B buyer persona for a moment.

There is a way that works better than others to communicate with that ideal customer.

Perhaps there are certain points of interest that this persona finds important.

Maybe you’ll meet them at a specific phase of the buying journey where they need specific information offered to them.

Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they need to know at the point they’d be consuming your blog content.

Your target audience has needs that your content must meet at every step of their journey.

Inform them about ways to deal with some of the roadblocks to their job.

Educate them with tips to do their job more effectively and with better results.

These personas represent ideal B2B clients, whose jobs are directly impacted by the products and services you offer.

By producing content related to your industry that helps them with some of the same things your products or services do, you’ll become a friend to them.

As you clarify this idea, you’ll be more successful at brainstorming topics to base your articles on.

Which Keywords Should You Be Using?

If there is one major technical and strategic benefit to a blog, it’s the search impact.

SEO is a valuable tool for every small business – especially in the B2B sector – to make sure they’re found by the right audience.

However, that’s not the only way you should be putting your keyword research to use.

Keywords can help inform your brand to make better business decisions.

One important decision is the topics you’ll cover as a part of your B2B blogging strategy.

Think about what a keyword is for a second.

It’s a search term that your audience is interested in.

Researching new keywords and key phrases to use is an SEO tactic that finds what people are searching for.

And, if they’re searching for it, they want to know more about it.

When you’ve found something during your keyword research that your expertise qualifies you to talk about, you’ve found a topic that’s valuable for your brand.

To do keyword research, you’ll need a couple of tools at your disposal.

Keyword research is best done through Google’s keyword planner.

But you’ll need to get a little more information to back up that research.

Google only offers the popularity of a keyword and how competitive ranking for it is.

Add a search on Buzzsumo, Quora, Alignable, and even Reddit for those keywords.

What you get back from that search will inform you of the most pressing questions and interesting topics related to that keyword.

You can now brainstorm your content with complete information.

What Topics Might You Write Your B2B Blog About?

By now, with all the work you’ve already done, you should have a good idea of what your target audience wants to read.

Your B2B blogging strategy now has tons of keywords to rank for and write about.

Create a list of topics that you’ll be using those keywords under.

This list should encompass the overall topics that a series of blog articles will fit under the umbrella of.

Think of them as your blog categories, or ways to organize the articles into related content.

It’s a great way to organize your ideas as well, which helps you create the articles much easier.

Additionally, these categories will help you keep your content diverse, which is important.

Diversity in your B2B blogging strategy allows you to create content that solves your customers’ issues through every step of their journey.

You also don’t wind up boring your audience with repetitious articles or running out of content ideas.

As an ever-evolving list, the topics you list under each category will continue to grow and change, helping you clarify the path your B2B blogging strategy will take over time.

Knowing where you’re headed and how to make adjustments in advance is critical to assuring your strategy continues to have success.

To come up with your blog categories, start grouping related keywords and key phrases together.

Look closely at the groups you’ve made and identify what makes these groups related.

Those relations are your categories, and you’ll use those as you create articles throughout execution.

Where Will You Promote Your Blog?

A major part of a successful B2B blogging strategy is the plan to promote your articles once they’re written.

Though your content will be optimized for SEO when you publish it, those rankings will take time to earn and start getting traffic through.

In the meantime, you need to make sure your articles get seen by the audience it was intended for.

There are a variety of ways to promote your articles, and you need to decide what’s right for you.

All options, however, require you to rely on social media.

Every social network has a segment of the audience you’re trying to reach.

Some platforms are better for B2B than others (think LinkedIn over TikTok).

But don’t automatically exclude any of them without researching first.

Using more than one platform is more effective, but don’t overextend your abilities.

Staying consistent with fewer promotion platforms is better than extending to more than you can handle and killing your audience.

Once you’ve chosen platforms, decide how you’ll share across them.

For many, it’s easier to duplicate the same promotional content on every platform while others create different posts tailored to each platform.

Combining those two methods works as well.

Whichever you choose, make sure you’ve got enough of your target audience on the platform to make sense.

Don’t produce messages that will simply get lost on a platform that your audience is rarely on.

Now You Have A Foundation For Your B2B Blogging Strategy

With everything you’ve just learned, your B2B blogging strategy should be incredibly effective.

However, you still need to determine if you’re ready to focus on following through long enough to see the results.

Produce solid blog articles for your B2B audience consistently and be sure to promote them thoroughly across your content channels.

You’ll start drawing in qualified leads and, more importantly, more sales for your brand.