Don’t Just Create B2B Content, Leverage It!

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with a B2B site owner for an SEO training session, and we started talking about his blog. He’d done a little bit of blogging in the past but had never really seen any lasting impact for his business so, like many other great ideas, he let it fizzle out and poured the extra time into other business projects. What I tried to convey (and hopefully did!) was that B2B blogging is a hugely important part of your overall SEO campaign. The content you create is what the search engines “read” to determine what your website is about and if it’s a good fit for a particular search query. Every blog post you create also creates another entry point into your website, as each page is ranked individually by the search engines. The more blog content you create the more times your brand could show up in the SERPs, plus blog posts are excellent opportunities for targeting long tail keywords that didn’t make it into your onsite SEO. In addition, your B2B blog content helps establish your brand as an industry leader and earns natural links over time as your content is cited, quoted, and linked to as a resource.

Now all of this is great, but B2B blogging is not like the field of dreams—you can’t just build it and expect organic traffic to just fall into your lap. Writing and publishing content is only the first part of the blogging process—you also have to promote it! More and more businesses are realizing the value of blogging so if you want your content and your brand to stand out you can’t wait for people to find you; you have to go to them. That’s how social media gets brought into the inbound marketing family (alongside SEO and content marketing).

Let’s say you run own a bookkeeping business in the Boston area and you’re targeting small business owners. Your content should reflect the issues, questions, needs, wants, and concerns of your target audience, right? So you might write blog posts about setting up payroll for a new employee, tax credits for small businesses, managing cash flow, and so forth. Your B2B blog should be a resource for when your target audience needs you. But chances are you aren’t the only bookkeeper or accountant in Boston so you also probably aren’t the only one writing about those topics in an attempt to grow your business. In order to make your content stand out (in addition to it being stellar content), you’ve got to make your blog as visible as possible.

Here are 4 ways you can promote and leverage your B2B content to build your organic search presence:

1. Submit it to LinkedIn groups.

LinkedIn is like a goldmine for B2B brands when it comes to content promotion. Not only should you be posting all your blog posts to your company LinkedIn page, but you should also join relevant groups and post your content there as well. For instance, our bookkeeper might join groups that focus on small business finance, connect business owners, finance software users, and so forth. The members of these groups have already identified themselves as members of your target audience simply by joining! You can also write unique content for different groups to help you reach more of your influencers and decision makers.

2. Join niche social networks.

If there is a social network for anglers I bet there is a social network that targets your niche and your target audience! These niche social networks might not have the social clout of Facebook or Twitter but you’re not trying to reach Facebook’s 800 million users—you’re trying to reach the people that you want to do business with. A niche social network is a great place to promote your B2B blog because, much like the LinkedIn Groups, the people who belong to these networks have identified themselves as your target audience. By promoting your content on these niche social networks you are reaching directly out to your target audience and making sure your message gets heard.

3. Look for on-topic forums.

In addition to niche social networks, also keep your eyes peeled for on-topic forums. Forums really are the first social network and thousands, if not millions, of active users login to forums every day. Here’s what search and social expert Rob Garner had to say about forums;

Forums and bulletin boards have been around since the beginning of the Internet. Strong bonds form on communities, and an expert can earn respect through earned participation which translates into many other benefits. Though I’ve been in digital marketing since the mid-90’s, I’ve spent thousands of hours administrating and participating on forums for business, hobbies, and for research. From a marketing perspective, owning or engaging in communities keeps you up on current language of a target audience, provides social interaction around content in real-time, and also creates user-generated content for search engines.

4. Create a company e-newsletter.

B2B businesses sometimes forget that some of their best potential customers are their existing customers. After all, if someone did business with you once you’ve already established some kind of rapport! Now you want to keep them interested and engaged long enough to make another sale. Don’t let all that great B2B blog content go to waste. In addition to promoting it heavily on social media, evergreen blog posts can also be incorporated into a company e-newsletter and sent out to your customer base. This is a great way to give your blog posts a second chance at life after the initial social flurry has subsided. As long as the information is still relevant why not keep getting value out of it?