Business blogging guide
Welcome to our latest newsletter, where we delve into the exciting world of business blogging. In this edition, we will provide you with a comprehensive guide on creating and leveraging a successful blog for your business.
A business blog is a powerful tool that allows your company to share the expertise of internal experts.
It goes beyond one-way communication and can help increase brand awareness, educate readers, and establish your company as a go-to expert. Engaging with online visitors nurtures relationships and encourages actions like subscribing or interacting. While it takes time and a long-term strategy, investing in a blog can elevate your brand, position you as a knowledge leader, and ultimately convert readers into loyal customers.
So, let's get started!
What is a business blog?
A business blog is a website with frequently updated content about specific keyword- or topic-oriented content.?
The keywords and topics that you create content around will depend on the nature of your business. Zooma's business blog provides content about onlinification and digitalisation because we sell solutions, services and software in these areas.?
It's important to highlight that your business blog is not a static part of your website. Rather, a business blog is regularly updated with relevant knowledge content. Once a day, once a week, or a couple of times per month at a minimum.
Download an extended step-by-step guide
Building a business blog can be a powerful part of your marketing strategy. But it requires planning, resources and effort to achieve a reasonable ROI.
This step-by-step guide will help you to implement a successful business blog.
Why B2B companies should blog
To make your website a valuable asset, people need to be able to find it. You won't generate much traffic if you wait for people to type in your URL in the address bar. Fortunately, people can find your online presence in many ways, and one effective route is through search.
The more relevant pages and content your .com/.xx has, the more chances you have to rank well in search engines. The problem is, you don't want to throw up just random pages all over your .com/.xx. That would be an awful user experience, and your .com/.xx would become a mess. Business blogging is a solution to that problem. Every time you publish a knowledge article, you create a new page on your .com/.xx. These articles are all organised within your blog, meaning you avoid cluttering your .com/.xx with pages.?
Every time you publish a knowledge article and create a new web page, you gain one more opportunity for your .com/.xx to rank in search and appear to users when they search online.?
When someone asks Google something like, "What is digital sales transformation?, hopefully, one of Zooma's blog articles will show up.
You can use and apply this logic to most other online and digital channels, too. Every time you publish a new blog article, you create a resource that users can share on social media, getting it out in front of a new online audience. It also generates a URL that another website can link to, giving you some SEO juice.
In short, business blogging is an effective way to create opportunities to get your website found by the people you want to reach and makes it easier to generate new leads and customers for your business.?
We've listed plenty more benefits in our article?"What are the benefits of business blogging?"?- it's a useful resource if you need to convince colleagues to invest time and resources in contributing to your business blog.
The challenges of content creation
For many content creators at traditional B2B companies, producing enough content is often challenging.
High-quality knowledge content needs to be created with expert input and aimed directly at solving prospects' and customers' most critical challenges.
This is difficult enough – but considering that the people in these positions often have many other responsibilities, they often run into problems.
In this episode, Alexander Evjenth chatted with Doug Bolton about the many challenges of content creation and how content producers at large in traditional B2B companies can increase the quality and quantity of their content. Enjoy.
Why business blogging works
You should never underestimate how many doubts your colleagues may have about business blogging as a tactic. Don't assume that everyone assumes that inbound works just because you work with it every day. When starting a business blog, it's always a good idea to make sure that your colleagues understand the purpose of the blog and what it contributes to the company.
In short, business blogging works because:
A free guide to help you implement a business blog
Implementing a business blog requires planning, resources and effort to achieve a reasonable ROI. This guide helps you to prioritise the essential components of starting a knowledge hub and to plan a successful launch or relaunch.?
How to start business blogging?
When you and your company start a business blog, it might feel difficult to stand out from your competitors - especially when they have a head start and you find yourself covering the same topics as them.
When you start blogging, you should remember that people will always benefit from relevant and actionable content. That means that you should?only?create high-value content that is loaded with answers on topics that your target customers care about. Every single piece of content must give them straight answers to their burning questions.
Your business blog will not do well if you're providing content that doesn't offer a solution to their pain points. But this throws up a question – what do my potential and existing customers actually want to know?
There are plenty of tools available that can help you answer this question. By analysing online activity, you can discover the most common questions and topics that your target audience is looking for. Here are some of the tools we use when researching relevant topics and issues:
There's more advice on?how to find the right keywords to target available in this article - take a look.
Knowing your target audience is vital in content marketing. After setting your objectives, you should do this groundwork to learn more about your target audience's pain points. What questions are they asking, what topics are they interested in, what challenges are they facing, and what solutions are they looking for??
When you gather this data, you should create detailed personas to guide your future content creation efforts. This is an essential aspect of business blogging today. Rather than simply building one business blog post for everyone, individual and detailed buyer personas will help you make more targeted content that gets results.
Topic cluster strategy?
At Zooma, we?create content around specific topics. Each topic has a core in-depth pillar page, a page with numerous chapters that provide general and high-level knowledge.?
Surrounding the pillar pages, we have 'cluster content' - typically articles that detail relevant issues related to the topic. Each piece of cluster content is linked to the pillar page and vice versa, eventually creating a network of content that covers many aspects of a particular topic.
This way of working is called the topic cluster strategy.?
Although the primary purpose of using this method is to help search engines distinguish our area of expertise, it's also an outstanding technique for generating business blogging ideas.?
In this podcast episode, Anders Bjorklund and Stellan Bj?rnesj? explain the topic cluster strategy, why it boosts your organic performance, and what kind of results we've seen after working with it for a while.
Content cadence
You should have a semi-flexible schedule for how often you publish new articles on your business blog. At Zooma, we aim to publish two new articles a week on our English-language blog, but depending on your resources and level of experience, once a week may be a more realistic goal to start with. You can always ramp up your content production once you have a smoothly-running process in place.
At any rate, deciding your posting frequency at an early stage is vital. It helps you plan your work in advance and makes it easier to get organised if your articles require expert input or design work. A consistent schedule is also appreciated by your readers – your brand image will be affected if they suddenly receive four new posts in a week and then hear nothing from you for two months.
For more guidance on how frequently to publish new posts on your business blog, take a look at our article "Content cadence: How to find the perfect publishing schedule"
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Promoting your content
With business blogging, creating content is only one part of the job. The work continues after you have published the content. Content marketing follows the 80/20 rule - 80% promotion and 20% creation. Once your business blog content is ready to be shared, you should promote the new content on your social channels.
Your blog will generally be the starting point for the conversations you will have with the content consumers. After that, you must work actively on promotion to ensure that your message connects with more people.?
Once published, your articles will start appearing in search results. This is a type of promotion, but you don't have too much control over it (although effective SEO will naturally lead to better ranking). It's likely that you will promote your content through two main channels - social media and email.
Social Media
When working with social media, you should focus on the platforms where your target audience is active. For example, if your potential and existing customer base are in the B2B world, it's probably better to focus on LinkedIn than TikTok or Snapchat.
Regardless of the platform, it's hard to go wrong if you post relevant and engaging content, ask thought-provoking questions, engages actively with your audience and offer credible, relevant and valuable insights. By building your presence on one or two channels, you will establish your brand authority and voice. After this, you can promote your content to people you already know and trust.
The platform you should choose also depends on what kind of content you will be sharing.?As a general rule, the following platforms are best used for:
Email marketing
Email is not as new and shiny as some other techniques today, but it is still compelling. The key to being successful with email marketing is personalisation. Nobody wants to receive mass emails; almost everyone prefers relevant suggestions and advice.
Use email sign-up forms on your online presence to build a list of contacts, which will give you a direct line to their inboxes. From there, you will be able to nurture stronger one-to-one relationships with people, encouraging them to amplify your brand message. With enough contacts in your email list, you will be able to segment it - for example, by the recipient's industry, location or role. By creating separate emails for each of these segmented groups, you can be more confident that they'll find your emails relevant.
As mentioned above, companies typically find it difficult to determine what content is relevant for their audience. As a result, business blogging initiatives either fail or even struggle to get off the ground.?
Techniques and formats for generating new business blogging ideas
Here are a few methods we use to not run out of topics.
Google's 'People also ask'
Google is my second brain. Regardless of what I want to write about, I go to Google and use the infinite source of topics with numerous different angles and perspectives to find inspiration for my article. One of the tools I use most to find inspiration for new topics is the 'People also ask' box.
This feature is a great place to find inspiration for sub-topics:
What, how, why, when, and who?
Historically, these five words have helped me a lot when coming up with a new angle for a topic. For example, if I'm about to write an article next week about business blogging, I can write about;
Gather frequently asked questions
Ask your colleagues what questions they get from external people, such as customers and suppliers. Creating a list of frequently asked questions is a valuable library to choose from whenever you or your colleagues struggle with new ideas.?
Vary whom you write to
When you can vary the level of detail in your articles, you will be able to create endless amounts of content around the same topic. As a B2B business, you probably aim to build your reputation and show your experience to a wide range of external stakeholders. Think about who these stakeholders are, and use that information to narrow the angle of your topics.?
For example, when I write content about?business blogging, I want to address content creators, CMOs, Sales Managers, and Service Managers. Writing at least one article dedicated to each role helps me to come up with new perspectives and angles on the topic.?
Business blogging tips for achieving long-term success
Any company can start a business blog. Few know how to run it successfully in the long run. In my role at Zooma, I have gathered a lot of best practices for business blogging; here are my tips.
Write an article per week, publish and promote. Repeat. It doesn't sound that complicated to someone who has never done it before. But whoever gets started quickly realises that this perception of business blogging does not reveal the whole truth.
Business blogging involves ideation, planning, interviewing, researching, production, reviewing, scheduling, and analysing. And yes, running a business blog is time-consuming.
Some blogs succeed, others fail. I've seen it multiple times with my own eyes. In each case, three areas determine the blog's fate; the team, the content, and the process.?
The team
Successful business blogging depends on a group of people with multiple skills. In the article,?Knowledge content: How to run a content team, part 1, Niyat Ghebremichael?describes why and how you design your content team for consistent output of high-quality knowledge content. Below are the descriptions for the roles enabling a content-creating machine.
The content manager?
This role requires strong leadership and administrative skills. A content manager is responsible for running the whole business blog, which involves planning future articles and the general direction of the content. The person is the directly responsible individual (DRI) and leads internal meetings for content reviews. Finally, the content manager does the scheduling, publishing, and promotion on social media. Having a person with the overall picture of the business blog is critical for long-term success.?
The content creator
Due to that, the content manager has an overall picture of the blog, and the content creator can focus all their time on creating high-quality knowledge content. This role requires skills such as interviewing, researching, SEO-optimisation and writing as they're responsible for taking a topic idea to the desk and delivering a knowledge article.
The content board members
With a content manager and a creator, you'll keep your business blog running. But to make it succeed in the long term, you need to involve further colleagues for new and unique perspectives on topics. Thus, you gather a content board with members from different parts of the organisation, such as sales, product development, and upper management. The content manager should schedule a recurring content board meeting to pick their brain on new topic angles.?
The content
Even though business blogging is fun, you need to remember that the main purpose is to initiate conversions that drive more business. I've seen examples where organisations get stuck, only writing about topics they consider fun. It rarely yields results.
Instead, you need to ensure your content is relevant to your potential buyers. Each chosen topic must be carefully thought out, have a purpose and relate to your business or industry. To initiate conversions that drive more business, you need to write about the reality and needs of your personas and target groups.?
The production process
In?this article, Doug Bolton explains?how to run a content team and?describes the production process we use at Zooma.
Here is a summary of Zooma's content team production process. We start from the content board at the top.
On a monthly basis, the content manager meets the content board consisting of 3-4 strategic roles at Zooma. The purpose is to give insights into what topics are most relevant for the organisation in the coming month. Based on the input, the content manager plans the future content with the content creators in a weekly content team meeting.?
Now, all content creators know what to produce. They interview, do research and create a draft of the content. If the content creator is ghostwriting for an expert, the draft is sent for review. Either the expert wants to change something, or it goes to the content review meetings, which are held weekly.?
Once the final draft is reviewed and edited, the articles are scheduled or published.?
After some time, the content manager analyses the outcome of the article, which will be presented in the following content board as a basis for future discussions.
By ensuring you have a good team, relevant content and a structured production process, you'll achieve long-term success for your business blog.?
Do you want to discuss your content needs?
Zooma provides a full range of content services - whether you want to outsource your content creation to us or expand your content team's capacity.
Our content services include:
You can read more about our content creation solutions and watch the video with?Doug Bolton,?Alexander Evjenth?and?Anders Bjorklund to understand how we can move your content creation forwards.
We hope you've enjoyed this edition of our content creation newsletter. Stay connected with us by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on social media. We'd love to hear from you if you have any feedback or suggestions for future editions.
Thanks for reading!