By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
If you’re a manufacturer and you don’t have a blog, you should. Why? Because 4 out of 5 B-to-B marketers use blogs. B-to-B blogs aren’t new, but manufacturers are finding out that they are a good way of setting themselves apart from the competition, and according to the Content Marketing Institute, over 50% of marketers expect blogs to be critical in 2017.
Challenges of B-to-B Blogs
Even though marketers expect blogs to be critical in the coming year, most B-to-B bloggers have some challenges … here are 3 of them:
1. If only 41% of bloggers have clarity on content, is it any wonder why they can grow an audience?
2. Don’t make the blog about the Company, make it about solving problems for your target audience.
3. Use key metrics to measure performance. Blogs are a long-term strategy and may not produce direct sales.
Maximize Your Blog
Recently, I read an article by Heidi Cohen on 10 Tactics on How to Maximize your Blog results. Here are some highlights:
- Align your blog with your marketing and business strategies.
- Know who your audience is and write to them. A typical B-to-B sale involves 5.4 people. How are you going to reach all of them? And will the message be the same for all?
- Do some research. Find out what kind of articles get the most traffic. Look at search results key words on how people are finding you.
- Plan your blog content. You need to publish on a regular basis and someone should be in charge of the editorial so your messages are kept on track.
- Optimize content. Get it to existing customers, use social media and search to get the word out.
- Build an internal email file of those who subscribe to your blog.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to make your blog the centerpiece of your outbound marketing program. It’s the ideal way of segmenting the market and making you the industry leader in solutions to their problems.
