Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices

Many of our clients and visitors to our site have questions about blogging in the B2B marketing world. We believe that blogging is a very good solution for starting your interactive journey of engagement with your audience. But we also understand that there needs to be a focus on creating compelling content that helps your audience become informed about your products and service, demonstrate thought leadership, or meet other needs of your readers.

Too often we see a blog that is full of press releases from marcom teams that provides minimal value to the reader. What we mean by compelling content is a blog entry that provides unique viewpoints from executives about industry trends, macro-economic issues which impact the industry, or industry developments. That does not mean static, boring paragraphs on dry topics. Rather it means providing your analysis on why this information is important for your audience. We know from our work with SAP that prospective buyers of B2B products and solutions are looking for executive viewpoints to understand where the company is going and to see if they agree with the direction. This is especially true for those companies preparing to buy a product which represents a significant change to their business operations.

But does that mean that your team must write a long 1,000 word blog entry each time? Some teams think so, and that provides a disincentive for internal members to contribute. As a team charged with blogging for your organization, the best way that you can build internal contributions is to train potential bloggers that entries should take multiple forms ranging from the short paragraph and link to an article to the summary of a key issue that may take several paragraphs to describe properly.

As long as your writers are providing a point of view on the content, the length doesn’t matter. A few sentences detailing why an article link provided is valuable often is more widely read than the long entry. Remember, B2B readers often have less time than B2C readers who are reading for enjoyment. Because of this dynamic, a short and to the point style is often preferable.

In our day long workshops to train organizations on the best practices of social media, we use a menu analogy to help everyone understand that social media works best when there are multiple courses and types used. We teach teams about using cocktails, appetizers, entres, and desserts to tantalize, teach, and engage with their audiences. As part of the workshops, we build recipe cards for our teams. Our blog recipe card is shown below:

This recipe card covers multiple ideas needed to consider when blogging. But overall, the idea is that a consistent well written blog can be very useful for both the organization and its target audience.  Content must be of interest, well written, and invite comments. Once comments are made, your organization must engage even if the comment disagrees with your idea or premise. Organizations that will not respond to user comments should not blog. Those that do engage will receive the benefits of social media engagement, leaving those who do not far behind.

Do you have questions about what to blog? Here is our rule of thumb for B2B blog content (it’s based upon our metrics analysis of client blogs):

1. 50% thought leadership
2. 20% analysis & insight
3. 15% promotional (events)
4. 15% announcements (product related)

Want to engage your audience? Try these best practices we and others have developed

1. Write in a personal voice, have an opinion or point of view
2. Blog content should have an element of uniqueness
3. Offer insight and analysis to events and/or trends
4. Add graphics, videos, charts, etc. Anything that can offer more connection and activity for the viewer
5. Update your blog using a calendar schedule so that it doesn’t become stale
6. Use your personal experiences to enrich your blog, people can easily tell if you are just posting press releases
7. Be conservative with the amount of links to your site or products
8. Talk about what’s on your mind, do not just copy and paste press releases
9. Do not make the blog into a sales brochure, diversify your content
10. Do not replicate content on the blog that you can find on your main site
11. Do not ignore your readers, if you see that there are comments, answer them and create a two way dialogue

Remember that you will have many more readers than those who will engage and comment. Help your audience. Think of their needs, then write the stimulating content in a concise manner that will meet those needs. Ready to blog? We hope so and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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2 Responses to “Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices”

Tweets that mention B2B Blogging - Best Practices | Impact Interactions -- Topsy.com says:

April 13, 2010 at 10:52 am

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Blogging for Business II – What to Look for in a Blogger | Impact Interactions says:

April 15, 2010 at 9:13 pm

[...] his post earlier this week (“Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices”), Mike Rowland expertly covered a lot of ground in laying out best practices and benchmarks in [...]