Does having a B2B blog work for B2B marketing; namely marketing well-produced content, driving website traffic, generating potential leads and demonstrating your company’s capabilities?
Blogging technology has made it (relatively) easy to set up a blog, but that’s only the first step in making a B2B blog support your quest for inbound marketing success.
A cohesive approach to this is having an ultimate destination for your website visitor with a metaphorical “doorway” that leads them into a more informed and closer relationship with your business or organisation. That could be a white paper or useful guide – something that will help and educate them while showcasing your knowledge and expertise – available to download for the small price of submitting contact details. Using effectively optimised blog posts to attract organic search traffic and guide visitors to your free collateral is an integral part of that inbound marketing approach.
However, in the absence of a piece of B2B marketing collateral to offer all is not lost: a thoughtfully-written and insightful blog post can constitute excellent content in itself; showing the depth of your business acumen, highlighting and examining topical issues for your audience, providing stimulating analysis and potential solutions while building your reputation and association with the area of activity.
blog activity and b2b marketing
From an analysis of visitors to the Metamorphic PR website in the past six months, it’s clear that blog content provides a great, big signpost to direct people into your site. Of all the landing pages hit by visitors since February, more than 50% were blog posts. In fact, the top 18 landing pages in that time were blog posts.
But while having well-optimised blog content helps search performance, combining it with digital distribution through social and professional media channels makes all the difference: of the visitors to the aforementioned landing pages, 40% were referred (or redirected) from links on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. For this example, LinkedIn is virtual streets ahead with 20% of referral traffic. And landing page hits aside, 60% of all site traffic in six months has come from either social media referral or organic search terms, and more than 50% of it from the quartet of LinkedIn, Twitter, G+ and Facebook (in that order).
So, B2B blog content helps your business’ organic search engine ranking, provides meaningful content for your social media channels and is highly likely to be an effective entry point for many visitors to your site.
Inbound marketing pioneers, HubSpot, in its 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report, lauded the power and return on investment of business blogging:
- 62% of marketers surveyed will blog in 2013.
- 82% of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog, as opposed to 57% of marketers who blog monthly — which, by itself, is still an impressive result.
- 79% of companies that have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing this year.
- Blogs produced a new customer for 43% of marketers last year.
- Just 20% of companies without a blog reported ROI from inbound marketing in 2013.
- Blogging has enjoyed strong annual budget growth — 23% of marketers invested in blogs for 2013, a 9% increase from 2012.
- 9% of companies employ a full-time blogger.
- 43% of marketers generated a customer via their blog this year, and blogging requires roughly 9% of marketers’ total full-time staff dedications and 7% of their total budget.
- Blogs produce low-cost leads for 24% of the marketing community.
- While blogs require roughly 9% of marketers’ total full-time staff dedications, they also demand just 7% of marketers’ total budget outlay this year.
- 43% of marketers generated a customer via their blog with less than 10% of total time allocation.
Blogging to support your B2B marketing is like a marriage – it’s a long-term commitment and certainly has its pressures; but the more you put in, the more you get out of it.
If your business needs help with planning and creating blog content, then please get in touch via this online form, email or that quaint tool, the telephone, in big red numbers at the top of the page.
