The biggest excuse why the senior management of many B2B companies say that content marketing (blogging) will not work for them, and that it is a waste of time and money, is because their product/service and industry is boring and there is nothing to write about.
This assumption is dead wrong and costing you potentially millions in lost sales.
B2B blog posts are not boring
If your product and industry was boring, your product and industry would not exist. There would be no products or services in your industry. There would be no trade shows or trade associations in your industry. There would be no businesses in your industry. There would be no people or businesses who buy the products or services you sell. You would not have started a business if your product/service was boring and nobody cared about it.
The fact of the matter is that the industry you are in, and the products/services you sell, exist because they serve an important purpose. They solve problems. They make the lives of people easier. And making a person’s life easier (be it the life of a consumer or a business that buys from you), is mighty interesting to the people who lives benefit from your product/service.
It does not matter if you sell industrial ball bearings or industrial freezers or industrial gravel sorters. There is a group of people and businesses (your niche market) who care a heck of a lot about it. It is for those consumers and business buyers that you create your content (blogs) for so they will see you as an expert in your industry who provides helpful information, and they will want to buy from you.
Simple B2B Blog Topics to Write About
“Okay Peter, you are right saying that I should blog. But what on earth should I write about?”
Simple. First, create a list of the 20…50…100 questions people ask about your product or service and you create a new blog post for each question. Then, every time a new question comes up, you create a new blog post to answer it. To create a big list of questions, ask all of your employees to provide you with a list of at least 10 questions people ask them about your product/service.
Here’s more to blog about: what are the misconceptions people/businesses have about your product or service or your industry in general? Each one will make a great blog post.
Another biggie to write about is how you price your products/services. The first question that comes to a consumer or business buyer’s mind when they are considering buying your product or service is, “how much does it cost?” A mistake made by a lot of companies (including mine for a long time!) is they do not provide any pricing on their website and they tell their prospective customers that they need to either call them or complete an email contact form to get a price quote. Guess what? People HATE that because they assume it means your product or service is going to be really expensive or that they are going to get stuck talking to a salesperson who is going to try and hard sell them into buying. So, put your pricing on your website, even it you just give a price range. People will thank you for it and you will get more leads and sales because of it.
The Second Biggest Excuse B2B Companies Give for Not Blogging
A second excuse B2B companies give for not blogging is they don’t have time to write blog posts. The truth of the matter is that blogging does not have to take that much time. You don’t have to write 10,000 word epic posts and try to win a journalism award. Many of the best blog posts are short, written in very simple language, and get to the point quickly.
If it only takes you a couple of sentences to answer a question that people often ask about your product/service, that’s fine for a blog post. It’s always much better to write something short, simple, and helpful than to write nothing at all. In the world of content marketing, writing something is always better than writing nothing. If you can help a person by providing 30 words of advice, that’s a valuable blog post.
The quantity of words for a blog post does not equal quality. In fact, much of the time shorter blog posts are better because people are busy and they may not have time to read really long blog posts. There is no reason to write about something for 2,000 words when you can say the same thing and provide the same value in 200 words or less.
You also need to promote your blog posts to get them in front of your niche market
Unfortunately, just writing and posting articles to your blog is no longer enough to be successful with content marketing. If you want to get a lot of people in your niche market reading your blog posts, you need to promote your blog posts to your niche market using Facebook’s custom audience post promotion tool.
In summary, every B2B business should be doing content marketing (blogging) of at least one new post per week to provide valuable information to their niche market. Two or three new posts per week is even better. Then, you should promote your blog posts to your niche market using custom audience post promotion on Facebook. Doing so will increase your number of leads and sales, especially if you’re doing content marketing and your competitors are not, or they are rarely doing it.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: The Top 2 B2B Content Marketing Excuses Destroyed
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