Blogs are of course a great way to attract traffic to your website. Imagine: fresh and interesting content on your site every week. People finding you when they google a product or service. People crawling all over your site. Engagement.
Then there’s the business of being interesting when you write. How do manage that? Here today are three of the five essential things you need to write blogs in B2B.
1-You need to find what really, really interests you about the industry/products
Sound cliché but it is true. Do you like the human element of any given subject? It’s economic impact? Are you a geek-wannabe-engineer that loves to read about and regurgitate technical detail? Use whatever passion you have as part of your angle. If you are engrossed in a subject, your writing will show it. As Neil Patel has said “Blog like you mean it”
I had never written about Engineered wood. Never even knew it existed. But as I got to know the industry I found it absolutely fascinating. That’s because It ties into a lot of things I find interesting. Housing, Economic conditions, the environment. Maybe I got lucky. But I think any product has a human element attached to it somehow, and that will make it interesting.
Are some industries inherently boring to write about? Haven’t seen one of those yet. In fact, one of the most boring subjects to me, is marketing. Well ok, maybe marketing isn’t boring per se, it’s just that I find it much less interesting than some of the industries that I write blogs and content for. Engineered wood is more interesting than marketing. The packaging industry is more interesting than marketing. Carrier-class telecom equipment is more interesting than marketing.
2-You need to know your target audience
But step back here. It isn’t because I am interested by a subject that I can write something that will appeal to my customer’s target prospect. I have to understand and appeal to their mindset and interests. That’s why creating personas is so important. They help you narrow and refine the scope of your subject matter. Want to know one of the best places to get to know your target audience? The customer service department. Interview the reps. They will give you a detailed picture of the type of person likely to buy the products and the kind of struggles they have.
3-You need to love learning on a constant basis
If you are working in B2B marketing as a writer, chances are you are constantly struggling to understand the subject matter. This is normal. As you aren’t an engineer or an expert in economics, You have to read a lot. You need to get to a level of understanding of the subject that enables you to properly convey target industry pains and gains, and the benefits of using the products or services you are talking about.
If you are lucky though, you get to interview the experts in the company. This is a good way to learn because first of all, they have to dumb it down for you to understand, and then, you also become witness to their personal experiences in selling, installing or servicing the product. Ask them about what they’ve encountered in the field. Problems they’ve solved with customers or projects that they are working on. It’s an excellent way to get to know the target customer as well.
Always try to talk to the experts. Listen to them. It makes for great content.
Next week: part 2, with points 4 and 5.
