4 ways to improve your B2B blog

17 Aug

As part of my job I read a lot of blogs and follow those of competitors quite closely. Since launching a B2B corporate blog last year, it has become quite apparent to me how many companies dove in to the blogosphere with enthusiasm and have slowly fizzled out.  Initially, these companies were posting with reckless abandon but slowly there were fewer and fewer posts and I would no longer see them in my RSS reader as much.
Here are 4 reasons why I think B2B blogs fizzle out (and these could probably apply to blogs in the B2C space as well):

  1. Completely  Self-Referencing: This is the blog that ONLY talks about itself and all the great products that they are producing. This type of blog also mistakes press releases for blog posts. Remedy: Stop talking about yourself and share content about your industry or tips and tricks that maybe useful for your (eventual) readers.

  2. Lack of Content Strategy: This ties in to the first point. What will you be posting? Do you have enough to talk about around a particular topic? Before you start blogging make a list of topics that you can blog about. Think about the services you provide, the industry you are in and how your customers can benefit from your knowledge. Lacking resources? You’d be surprised at the wealth of knowledge and capability within your own company. Sure not everyone is a writer but everyone has ideas that can translate into blogs. Creating a small team in house to manage & edit the blog can help distribute the effort.

  3. Lack of Schedule: The newspaper gets delivered at the same time every day. The ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ feature gets published…every Monday! Having a schedule will a) let readers know when to expect new posts  and b) keep you on track when posting new content.

  4. Not knowing your audience: Who are you writing for? Is your audience highly technical? Your content should reflect what your audience is looking for.

  5. *BONUS* Lack of a Goal: What is your goal? Why are you writing this blog in the first place? Is it just because it is the ‘in’ thing to do? Or is it because you want to be a thought-leader? Generate sales etc? Without a goal in mind, all the above points are moot.

Have you seen similar issues? How do you manage your B2B blog? I’d love to hear!

Sandy

Comments are closed.