Evaluate the website of B2B companies nowadays and you’ll immediately recognize one thing: most all of them are blogging.
How well they’re utilizing their blog, however, is an entirely different story.
Here are five blogging mistakes that “boring” B2B companies make, and how to how spice things up:
Categorizing Themselves as “Boring”
Who’s to say that your industry is boring?
The first mistake is when companies categorize themselves as boring. This is harmful for two primary reasons.
- First of all, if you frame your thinking in terms of “being boring” all of your work will carry a resounding tone of uninteresting. This affects your brochures, your content, your website and your blog.
- Secondly, limiting yourself to this line of thinking, well, limits your thinking in general. You’ll automatically establish boxes and barricades around your creative process that will trip up any company brainstorming session.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If your business manufactures specialized parts for mining operations then your business might not be exceedingly interesting to someone in the restaurant industry.
You know what though? Your industry is interesting to those within your industry. The representatives you deal with, the customers and the competitors feel a passion and pride for your area of business. It’s their livelihood.
The content you cultivate is aimed at them–not the person running a restaurant. Think in terms of what your audience is interested in within your industry. This usually manifests as global news, local news, product comparisons/reviews, highlights of what makes your business special and much more.
Cutting It Short
One of the most common mistakes that B2B companies, and most businesses make, when it comes to blogging is producing posts that are far too short.
Anything under 300 words isn’t worth publishing for the whole internet to see. What do two sentence blog posts say to your readers? Several items including, but not limited to: you’re being lazy, you don’t have much to say, you don’t have any value to add to the conversation and that keeping up with your blog is a waste of time.
Not only will your audience devalue the content you’re providing, but search engines will frown upon your site.
In the ever-evolving formula that search engines use, websites are ranked in order of the most relevant by keyword phrases. Those with a large volume of skimpy content are viewed as irrelevant.
Using Blogs as Random Announcement Areas
Don’t misread this–you can definitely use blogs to announce product developments and company updates, but you have to do so with the right blueprint in mind.
As we established above, if your announcement is any fewer than 300 words then don’t even bother. Build the length of that announcement. Talk about what it is, who it affects, what it affects and what the overall value is to both the stranger and longtime customer.
If this is incredibly difficult then I recommend grouping several announcements into a singular post.
Whatever the case, your blog shouldn’t be a place to dump only announcements into. It is your resource to your prospective and established customers. It is your platform to create meaningful and relevant content that adds to the conversation and establishes your organization as an expert in your industry.
Neglecting to Use Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Your blog is the resource you offer to your audience, but it is also a powerful entity in the search engine optimization formula.
Whether you want to accomplish it or not, search engines are going to look at your content and pull out what they find to be keywords and keyword phrases. If you aren’t intentionally implementing the power of keywords and keyword phrases then you’re essentially allowing your posts to fly on autopilot, ranking for really whatever.
Take a proactive approach and start researching relevant keywords. When you find these, vet them and then start applying them to your post titles and copy.
Leaving Posts Hanging
Last, but certainly not least, is an egregious blogging sin affecting many businesses–leaving your audience hanging.
You’ve presented them new information, and they’ve taken the time to read it. What is the next step for them?
Perhaps a better way to frame your thinking is, “What is their next step in the education/buying process?”
The best way to leave off a blog post is with calls-to-action. A clear example of one of these is located at the bottom of this post. You’ve read and you want to learn more, so we lead you to the next step in the educational process with a content offer.
You can do this by linking to eBooks, videos, other blog posts–or if you’re blog post is specific enough–with a request a consultation button.