Your company needs a blog, but don’t worry if you don’t have one; they’re nothing to be afraid of.
Creating and maintaining a blog offers you the opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert, improve your SEO ranking and provide quality content to your leads / prospects. Clear, concise and easy to execute and maintain, your blog should be the lynchpin of your industrial marketing efforts.
While it may come as no surprise that blogs are not as prevalent in B2B marketing as they are in B2C, that is quickly changing, and keeping up with the times will give you a big advantage over your competitors.
What can blogs offer you? Here is a non-exhaustive list:
- The ability to instantly form a relationship. Someone out there needs your help, and having a blog gives you an opportunity to share your knowledge. This will enable you to build name recognition.
- The opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert. You are knowledgable about your industry. Show it! Sharing your knowledge with others further builds your name recognition and building a library of posts is a great way to establish credibility.
- Provide quality content through other channels. Blog posts should become your basic unit of content. Cut them down to create quotes for Twitter & Facebook posts and share the blog URL through social media to promote your blog. Sometimes there is more to say about a topic – sounds like a good start on a white paper! Sentence structure needs help
- Boost your SEO rankings. Each blog post essentially adds another page to your website, lending to its credibility in search rankings. Also, each post can include tags and keywords which can be linked to other pages on your website for an extra SEO boost.
“But,” you may say, “Writing a blog is time-consuming, and I don’t have that much to say.” That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Consider building up an initial reserve of blog posts (15-30). Then, all you need is to add another 1-2 posts per week to keep your content fresh. Your content doesn’t have to be all your own, either. You can maintain a company blog featuring different authors. Or, give your own take on someone else’s content.
Eventually, you will have a treasure trove of blog posts that can be shared via social media and periodic email blasts, or e-newsletters. Your blog is your basic unit of content, and if you aren’t building one into your industrial marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a chance to get ahead of your competition.
Photo Credit: Cristina
