As a content marketer, you know that your blog is an important tool for promoting your business. To be successful, you need to write well-crafted and engaging content that addresses your audience’s needs and helps them solve their problems. For B2B content writing, this can be challenging given the nature of your audience. However, with the right strategy, your blog can take off and bring business success to both you and your readers.
Let’s go over some of the best tips out there for B2B content marketers looking to improve their writing. For more inspiration, check out other Fullmoon articles about writing stellar B2B blog content.
- How to Develop A Winning B2B Content Writing Strategy
- 5 Tips for Perfecting Your B2B Content Writing
- How to Promote and Measure Your B2B Content Writing Success
Before You Start: How to Develop A Winning B2B Content Writing Strategy
It would be nice if you could start writing amazing blog copy right away and have it succeed instantly. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. In fact, the planning and strategizing stages of content writing are just as important (if not more important) than the writing itself, and for a good reason.
Without a strong content strategy in place, your content won’t be as effective or as engaging as it should be. It won’t deliver the results that you intend it to, or it will be confusing or boring to your readers. That’s why it’s essential to create a strategy before you start writing anything. Here are a few tips on how to go about curating your B2B content writing plan.
First, Understand Your Audience
The first questions you should ask are all about who your audience is and what they are after. Similar to when you first start a business or create a product, you want to understand who your customers are so that you can create content that is tailored to their needs and preferences. You don’t want to waste your time and money creating content that no one is excited to read.
For B2B content readers, start by thinking about the type of person you are trying to reach with your blog content. For example, are they executives or decision makers? Are they people employed in a specific department? How can you best appeal to them and address their particular pain points? If you can answer these questions, you can start creating content based on their wants and needs.
Second, Define the Goals for Your Content
The reason you start with your audience is that you need to know what they want and how you can give it to them. When creating your strategy, you need to think about what you want to achieve with your content, and more specifically, how you are going to deliver what your readers need.
A second goal, of course, is how your blog will benefit your business. Are you looking to build your brand awareness? Do you want to generate new leads? Whatever your goals are, they need to be measurable so that you can track the success of your content over time and adjust your strategy as needed.
Third, Outline Your Editorial Calendar
As part of your strategy, you should outline how often you want to publish new content and what types of content you will include. Do you plan to write a certain number of articles each week? Are you going to stick to a certain topic or cover all topics related to your industry? Refer to the notes you’ve made about your audience and your goals while making these decisions.
An editorial calendar will help keep you on track and ensure that you don’t run out of ideas for future posts. It can also help you avoid falling into a trap of publishing the same thing over and over again. Additionally, it holds you accountable by giving you tangible deadlines for your upcoming blog posts.
The Purpose Behind a Predetermined B2B Content Strategy
Now, you may be wondering why all of this is so important. By staying consistent with both your message and your content output, you can build loyalty with your audience. They will know that A) You provide useful content (thanks to understanding your audience), and B) You are committed to providing this content on a regular basis (thanks to your editorial schedule). This will make them more likely to return to your site in the future and may even encourage them to share your content with others in their network.
With a strategy developed, it’s time to start writing. How can you perfect your B2B content writing to get your plan (and its rewards) underway?
As You Write: 5 Tips for Perfecting Your B2B Content Writing
Writing successful blog copy may seem simple; after all, you are the expert on the product or service your business provides, so writing about it should come easily, right? Not necessarily. A good blog post or article is more than just a brain dump about a specific topic. It takes practice and skill to write copy that both informs and compels readers to action.
Fortunately, skills like writing can be improved, and sometimes all it takes is knowing how to narrow down your ideas and edit well. To that end, here are five tips that can help you improve your B2B content writing and see a greater return on all that you’ve invested in it.
Tip #1: Write Compelling Headlines
Headlines are critical to the success of your articles. They draw readers in and encourage them to read the rest of your content. We live in an age of click-through rates and impressions, meaning that your titles have to be good enough to stand on their own.
What makes a compelling headline for B2B blogs? We could probably fill a book with all the advice out there related to headlines, but here are some fan favorites. First, your headline must contain a keyword that your audience is looking for. If you include your target keyword in the first few words of the headline, it will also improve SEO results for your blog, which is always a plus. Secondly, your headline must evoke a sense of curiosity that will compel a reader to click. Finally, it must make a promise to the reader that the rest of the blog post will deliver (more on this later).
Of course, good headlines can’t guarantee clicks, but they certainly help improve your odds. Experiment with different headlines until you find a combination that works for you.
Tip #2: Simplify Your Style
While some of us who were English majors (*cough cough*) enjoy using fancy language and metaphors, a B2B content blog is not the place for them. Instead, keeping things simple, clear, and concise will help your content reach a wider audience.
Conciseness and clarity are hallmarks of clear communication, regardless of the channel used, and they shouldn’t be overlooked when you’re creating blog posts. Keep your sentences short and simple – your readers will thank you for it!
Don’t be afraid of using lots of headings and short paragraphs. Break text up with bullet points. Whatever you can do to break up large blocks of text and make the overall content more engaging will go a long way towards improving your readability and retention rate.
Tip #3: Use Visuals and Other Media
Text-only content is great for communicating ideas and arguments, but it’s typically not as engaging as other types of media. In fact, Google search will prioritize blogs and websites that use images over others that only use text. Plus, visual elements help break up the monotony that can come from repetitive text blocks.
Where applicable, you can use photos, charts, graphs, and other visual elements to enhance the look and feel of your posts. If you have access to video content, don’t hesitate to embed links to it between the paragraphs of your blog. Also, make sure to use alt text with all of your images so that search engines can properly index them.
Tip #4: Back Up Your Claims With External Links
Linking to outside sources will help increase your credibility when a newcomer accesses your blog for the first time. New audiences can be understandably skeptical, so providing them with information that they can’t easily verify on their own will help them develop trust in you and your brand.
If all you do is link back to your own website, it can make your info appear biased. However, on the flip side, it is important that you provide internal links when discussing a topic that you have addressed in a previous blog or when mentioning a product or service you offer (for example, if you want to read more about email campaigns for B2B companies, we have a blog post on that here!). It’s all about balance. Position yourself as an expert and thought leader without dismissing other credible sources.
Tip #5: Keep the Promises Your Headline Makes
Strong headlines convey a succinct message and catch the attention of readers quickly. They do this by promising something to the reader: “If you have this question, we have the answer!”
If your blog title promises to reveal the secret to achieving a certain goal, the copy within the blog better deliver. Otherwise, readers will feel deceived and likely lose interest in your brand. Without interest, they sure as heck won’t stick around long enough to become customers.
As we said in Tip #1, first impressions are important, so take your time to come up with a great headline. Just make sure to live up to that promise in the content that follows.
After Writing: How to Promote and Measure Your B2B Content Writing Success
With your B2B content written and your blog published, it’s finally time to promote it! There are a number of different ways you can spread the word about your new blog, but there are a few in particular that are particularly effective. Social media is essential for content promotion, as are digital ads that can help boost your visibility and attract new visitors to your website. Another useful tool is email marketing—when you send out regular newsletters to your subscribers, you’re creating a steady stream of traffic back to your site.
If this all sounds great but you’re looking for some guidance, perhaps some digital marketing experts to share the workload, don’t worry; we’ve got your back! At Fullmoon, we specialize in providing customized solutions for our clients, helping them reach more prospects, nurture relationships, and close deals faster than ever before. Interested? Let’s talk!
