Making a Business Case for B2B Blogs

If you ask any business-to-business (B2B) consultant or guru for his/her thoughts on starting a B2B blog, you are likely to hear buzz phrases like, community building, thought leadership, social interaction, relationship building and the list goes on ad infinitum. Those are all great marketing goals to have and a business blog is very good at achieving all those objectives.

However, you are a b2b technical or industrial marketer who lives and dies by leads and sales. Your company is a data-driven machine. You have to validate every marketing effort with measurable hardcore statistics. You have neither the time nor the resources to experiment with feel-good concepts like community and conversations that are difficult to measure.

How do you make a strong business case for a starting or maintaining a b2b blog in this scenario? Let me focus on two easily quantifiable and measurable reasons to blog:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Fresh Content + Search Engines (read Google) = More Traffic. This is a simple but undeniable formula for success with online marketing.

If you are marketing to the industrial sector, your target audience is searching for solutions and vendors on the Internet. According to GlobalSpec 2009 Economic Outlook Survey, 73% of engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial professionals spend three or more hours per week on the Internet for work-related purposes like research (the second step in the industrial buy cycle which is a methodical and deliberate series of four stages: Needs Awareness, Research, Consideration & Comparison, and Procurement - Understanding the Industrial Buy Cycle).

Most corporate and/or B2B websites tend to have static content, making it difficult to optimize beyond the initial efforts. Whereas a constantly updated business blog will show up more often in search engine results for targeted keywords and phrases. Higher search engine rankings, resulting traffic and their interactions on your site are all easier to measure, track and fine-tune for a higher ROI.

Here’s an example, our Industrial Marketing Today blog received 46% more traffic than our website in the past month. Of that, 22.5% clicked through to our company site, which is second only to Google in terms of referred traffic. Those are impressive results; especially since our redesigned and rebranded blog has been live for little over a month now.

Think about the money and time saved versus the organic search engine optimization of a business site.

Many marketers miss this tangible and important benefit of a business blog because of their single-minded focus on more hip Web 2.0 tactics.

2. Inquiry and Lead Generation
Demand or lead generation is the Holy Grail of B2B marketing. Your business blog can become the most productive source of high-quality leads. Optimized posts will lead to your prospects finding your blog when searching for answers to their queries. If your blog content is educational and addresses their problems, then they are more likely to engage with you further by downloading white papers, requesting a demo or registering for a webinar. These actions can lead to many of them becoming “sales ready” leads and/or customers.

Expertise blogs are great lead generators. Showcasing your internal experts is a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition. Your own engineers, technical and R & D team members are great resources for generating fresh content that is more customer-focused and solutions oriented. Engineers tend to respond much better to peer-to-peer recommendations than some stranger tweeting about your company or its products.

The best example of an expertise blog that I know of is the Emerson Process Experts blog moderated by Jim Cahill. BTW, it recently won BtoB Magazine’s BtoB Social Media Awards 2010 in the blog category.

Jim suggests providing individual contact information of the blogger or the expert referenced in the post, which can lead to new sales opportunities because the reader can contact the expert directly to start a more personal relationship.

For more information on using your blog as a lead generator, read my blog post, “How to Use a B2B Blog to Win Customers and Influence Prospects.”

The above two blogging techniques can produce dramatic and easily measurable results without spending a lot of money, as may be the case with other b2b marketing initiatives.

Need to set up a business blog? Are you struggling to generate fresh and relevant content that will engage your site visitors and move them forward in their decision making process? Give us a call at (713) 532-6490 or email me today and start the conversation about how we can help.

Thanks for taking the time to read Marketing Matters regularly. Have a Happy Memorial Day weekend.

Best regards,
Achinta Mitra

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P.S. Visit our blog Industrial Marketing Today.

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