By now, everyone knows you need a B2B blog for your brand. However, keeping up with a blog takes a lot of time and marketers don’t always see the results they want from their content. Desired results typically include generating new leads and converting leads into a client, as well as giving your website better visibility.
Chances are though if you’re reading this post, you’re not seeing the results from your blog that you’re hoping for. This is a common content marketing pain point, especially in the B2B world.
And if the market is so saturated with good content, how do you make your content stand out? And, more importantly, how do you make sure your content gets in front of the right people?
Due to the pressure of delivering a blog that actually converts readers into leads and leads into sales, you may be considering getting rid of your blog together. But, before you decide to give up on your hard-earned content, consider these ways you can reach the real decision-makers through your B2B blog.
7 B2B Blog Ideas to Help Reach Brand Decision-Makers
1. Take Buyer Personas Seriously
The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t already, is to create definitive buyer personas for the decision-makers at the types of companies you want to get your content in front of. We like this template from HubSpot. You should be sure to include the following persona components and more:
- Job titles
- Company size
- Skillsets
- Professional background
- Industry knowledge as it pertains to your brand
- Years of experience in your industry
- Age range
- Budget
- Career goals
- Challenges they face in your industry
- Pain points they encounter when trying to perform their goals
- How your brand solves pain points
- An elevator pitch about your brand that would appeal to decision-makers
- Where they can find your brand (search, case studies, blog, etc.)
It’s likely there are different types of decision-makers that you’re trying to reach, so be sure to create a buyer persona for each job title, industry segment, etc. We find it’s helpful to name each persona, and, keep in mind the different personas you are creating content for and to make sure to spread the content out evenly that caters to those specific people.
2. Cater Your Content Topics
Once you create your buyer personas, it’s time to plan content accordingly.
Next time you fill in your content calendar, consider the topics that actually appeal to decision-makers. It’s possible that “101” type basic content might get a lot of views, but it won’t get the right views.
If you’re a decision-maker at a top brand, you almost certainly have a solid understanding of the niche your brand falls into. How can you take your content to the appropriate level to meet these buyers where they’re at?
One way to plan the most relevant content is to meet with your client-facing coworkers. Ask them to come up with common questions that clients have or pain points that they notice. Turn these questions into post ideas, or even use the question for the post title. It’s a great way to grab attention and resonate with the decision-makers.
3. Move Your Readers Through the Buyer’s Journey
Just like you need to create content for different personas, you also need to create content for different stages of the buyer’s journey. The established (but useful) stages in order of how a buyer moves through them are awareness, consideration, and decision making.
Be sure to move your buyer personas through the sales funnel from awareness to making a purchase decision by linking up your content with the right resources. For example, if you are creating a blog post to generate brand awareness, you want to link your post with content that takes the reader to the next step, consideration.
In the consideration phase, it’s likely the reader wants to learn more about how your brand can solve pain points so links to a landing page and/or case studies would move them to the next step.
Another example, if you’re creating a post that caters to buyers in the consideration phase, you want to link to resources that guide them through the purchase decision page like how to get in touch with your brand or examples of work you’ve done in the past.
Say you’ve created three buyer personas and you want to move each one through the buyer’s journey. That means you have nine different posts to create to cover the full spectrum of your buyer personas and your buyer’s journey. Say you’ve named your personas Alice, Peter, and Bob. Your upcoming post targets should look like this, with three posts per persona:
Alice: Awareness, Consideration, Decision Making
Peter: Awareness, Consideration, Decision Making
Bob: Awareness, Consideration, Decision Making
Feel free to mix them up, but be sure to create an equal amount of B2B blog posts that speak to each of these personas in each of their phases. It’s helpful to create a content calendar where you can keep track of the posts geared toward your target personas and stages.
4. Optimize Your Email Program
If someone within a brand has reached the decision-making phase of their career, they are almost certainly a high-ranking employee in the company, knowledgeable about the industry, and don’t have a lot of time on their hands. Therefore, they aren’t doing a lot of research about or keeping up with a scattered variety of B2B blogs.
This means you need to get your B2B blog in front of them and accessible when they have time. You can do this by emailing a weekly digest of your blog content. Use your most valuable post titles in the subject line, and consider segmenting your emails either by industry or buyer personas.
Because we believe in content digests so passionately here at FeedOtter, our product is an easy-to-use content marketing tool that automates content digest emails and integrates with tools like Marketo, Pardot, and more so that you can drip content to all of your leads and clients. It only takes five minutes!
5. Use LinkedIn
There are a few ways you can use LinkedIn to get in front of your target audience. Let’s explore a few:
- Message your contacts: You can message up to 50 of your contacts at a time. We recommend using this feature wisely and limiting the messages you send out to once a quarter, so be sure to lead with your strongest content. Research shows that people open LinkedIn Mail 85% more often than regular email. So, while you could export your LinkedIn contacts and email them directly, we don’t recommend doing it that way.
- Updates: You should share your content on both your personal LinkedIn profile and on your company page. Be sure to leverage hashtags and catchy taglines. We recommend you update your profile and company page once per post. When decision-makers are considering your brand, they might vet your LinkedIn profile so you need to establish thought leadership.
- Ads: LinkedIn Ads allow you to get really specific when it comes to the types of companies and job titles that you are trying to get in front of. We recommend not just putting an ad up about your company; you need to lead with thought leadership resources, like your best B2B blog posts. This works with any budget and you can pay per click to be sure the right people are reading your posts.
6. Align with Sales
Be sure that your sales team knows everything about the awesome B2B blog content that you produce. If your sales rep is talking to a lead, that lead is in the consideration or decision stage of their buyer’s journey.
Equip your sales team with content that appeals to the different stages and industries, and sales can leverage your thought leadership content to establish brand credibility and close deals.
While brand awareness content is part of the buyer’s journey (and thus part of your blog), know that if sales is talking to a lead, they have obviously moved passed the awareness phase, so you shouldn’t need to share that type of content with your sales team.
You might want to consider an internal library that you update with your new content. This way you can slice and dice it up to sales by categorizing your content by buyer persona and buyer’s journey.
If you want to take it a step further, you can pre-write social media posts for your sales team to share on their own social channels every week. Any bit of word-of-mouth recommendations you can get that point to your content is extremely helpful.
7. Re-Think Your CTA
The usual CTA (call to action) at the end of a B2B blog post functions for readers to ask pertinent questions or share personal insights in the comments below. But, are people really commenting? If you feel like you’re doing everything it takes to reach the decision-makers, but you’re still only reaching mid-level or entry-level readers, invite them to share your post with their boss or co-workers.
Conclusion
The key thing to consider when creating a blog targeted towards decision-makers is to make certain you’re utilizing and integrating your individual buyer personas and buyer journeys. Leveraging email and LinkedIn can be really powerful, and don’t forget to have your co-workers share your awesome content. Give these strategies a try before you decide to give up on or put less time in your B2B blog.
Are you ready to get your B2B blog in front of the right people? Try our curated newsletter feature to stay on top of mind for your target consumers.
