How to make your B2B blog interesting

B2B blog content doesn’t have to be boring you know.

Business blogs and B2B communications have acquired a reputation for being rather dry, a bit uninspiring and somewhat tedious. In many cases, they fully deserve this painful labelling, but it doesn’t always have to be this way.

Unfortunately, for the B2B blog writer, the existence of these lifeless blogs is something of a license to continue the trend. All they see and read is dull and dreary, so they go away and write something equally dull and dreary to match.

I say no. I say, let’s buck the trend, change the habit, break the mould!

I’ve seen first-hand how B2B blogs can be inspiring, explosive, powerful… even viral. I’ve watched website traffic beat all previous monthly records in a day because of some brilliant blogging. If you want to see a real return on your content marketing investment, you are hereby forbidden to create uninteresting content for your B2B blog. Here’s how to make it better today.

Use a great B2B blog writer

Your blog will never increase in awesomeness unless the writing itself is relatively awesome. You don’t need to hire Shakespeare himself to create an amazing blog, you just need a person who:

  • Loves to write
  • Can research pretty much anything
  • Embed themselves in your company
  • Understands your business and marketing objectives

If you’ve got a natural wordsmith in your business, great… make sure you are making best use of them. However, if you lack such talent or can’t spare a team member for this sort of task, consider hiring a professional content writer to do the hard work for you.

Find out how Content in a Box can help you with B2B content marketing >

Know your industry

In order to write with authority, you’ve got to know something about the industry you’re in.

Actually forget that. Doesn’t matter about the industry you’re in – what matters is the industry your customers are in.

What’s going on right now? What are their current challenges? Who are your audience and what are they doing? It’s OK (for once) to use a bit of jargon and buzzwords in your content, because your audience will already be familiar with this.

If you’re writing for yourself, this should be easy enough. After all, this is your day-to-day business, you should already have a good understanding of your customer and their market. If you’re outsourcing to a professional writer, they should be able to grab the nuts and bolts of this as part of their research. However, if there are big things happening, it might be worth pointing them out during the briefing to be confident they won’t be overlooked.

Use facts, stats and proper data to back up your stories

In our hearts, we all love some gripping statistics. Facts and stats when relevant to us, our role and industry, have a way of grabbing our attention and getting us clicking on headlines. By all means, use other people’s numbers to back up your opinion pieces, but if it’s at all possible come up with your own numbers or statistics to be unique.

If your B2B audience sees a headline like “The small change in our marketing that generated 220 % more enquiries” they are going to want to know your secret! Refer to case studies, real life statistics and personal experiences to truly personalise and enlighten your posts.

Don’t be overly narcissistic

Yes, you are creating a blog to promote your business, yes you sell great products, but is it always necessary to remind your readers just how great your company is? Surely you have other streams of marketing to do that for you?

If you’ve got a big company update (we just bought out Joe Bloggs Ltd for example) then by all means use your blog to promote it. Similarly, if you launch a new product, or want to do the occasional product comparison against your competitor’s stuff, go for it. But don’t bang on about yourself week in, week out.

People will just stop reading.

Don’t be afraid to go deep

This is a B2B blog. The people reading your blog are already ‘in the know’, so to speak, so they don’t want to be taught to suck eggs. What they want is interesting, in depth information that truly enlightens and educates them on the stuff they are interested in. Value.

Journey into unchartered territory, address the difficult topics, become the Jedi master for your industry. It doesn’t matter if you work in a niche as narrow as a tightrope, when you’re the expert in that niche, anyone who has anything they need to know about it will be coming to you for advice.

The absolute key to delivering engaging, interesting content to your B2B audience is to really understand your buyer persona. You need to know what they want, how they want it and when, which is going to require a significant tranche of research. It could end up being hours or even days of time investment but, trust me, it’s an investment well worth making.

For more on aligning your B2B blog with your buyer persona read this post on the subject.

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What is a B2B customer story?

A customer story is a great tool to use if you’ve got a really well defined buyer persona, and a willing customer that’s a carbon copy. Here are a few thoughts on what this entails.

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The power of content personalisation

My thoughts on personalising the content journey, even when you don’t know someone’s name. Marketing friends, do you see better results from personalised content, or is your more generic content just as effective?