Want to Turn Browsers Into Buyers? Follow These 3 B2B Blogging Rules

What makes a good B2B blog? 

Over ten years of working with companies from seed-funded startups to enterprise blue-chip giants has taught us three lessons. 

We outline them in this blog post and show you why they matter - backed up by people you’re probably trying to sell to. 

1. Laser-focus on the problem and explain how your solution solves it 

People don’t care about your product unless they have a problem that it can solve. 

So how can you get in front of this audience actively looking for what you’re offering? 

First, here’s what your digital marketing strategy should not involve: leaving the match between intent and content to chance. 

To see why you need to fit the reader to the problem as tight as possible, take cold emails (outbound marketing) as an example. You can send hundreds of thousands of marketing emails about your product or service. But of all the recipients, how many will actually get back to you? 

The answer: Only people who have the problem you’re proposing to solve and might have some idea of how to solve it, i.e., people who are either “solution aware” or “problem aware.”

Instead of hoping to reach someone who might need what you’re offering at that exact time, you need to be visible to those looking for a solution like yours right now. You can put your content in front of these people with targeted B2B SEO and inbound marketing. 

To get in front of problem-aware buyers with B2B blogs, you need to be hitting those bottom-of-the-funnel (BOF) keywords.

Bottom of the funnel keywords are keywords (i.e., search terms) that users enter into search engines when they’re nearing the end of their buyer’s journey. They tend to be longer, i.e., “low-cost cloud storage for small companies,“ and have a higher CPC than top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel keywords which are typically broader terms like “cloud storage.” 

In our experience, BOF keywords are an incredibly important part of B2B content marketing strategy. 

Imagine: You’re a company that provides anti-phishing solutions to other companies, and you want to start creating high-quality blog content that will result in lead generation. 

Someone on your team comes up with the idea to do an in-depth guide to phishing for dummies. But… does the world really need another explainer of what phishing is? Does the security professional who is acutely aware that a large percentage of security incidents start with phishing campaigns? 

The security professional is searching for a solution to their problem: employees opening phishing emails. 

Rather than typing in “phishing” into whatever search engine they use (way too generic), they’re likely to search for things like “phishing email simulator,” “test your employees phishing,” and “phishing test service.” 

These BOF keywords don’t have a high monthly search volume. For example, “phishing test service” has 0 volume, according to Semrush. 

But that keyword 

a) appears as a keyword in Semrush and 

b) has a high CPC of 32.11. 

That means other companies’ marketing efforts involve bidding for this keyword in ads, and they probably wouldn’t do so if it weren’t profitable, i.e., it didn’t lead to conversions. No one is paying >$32 for clicks from search terms that are not worth money to them.

It’s also a keyword that has 0 difficulty, so ranking for it organically shouldn’t be difficult. And you could save your company ~$32.11 per click if you were to work on replacing ads with organic content for this keyword. 

Learn more: Search engine optimization for security companies

2. Compare your product/service to your competitors using comparison keywords 

The people you’re targeting are experts in their domain. Your task is often not to educate them about their industry and the problems they’re facing but to help them find a solution that will make their life easier. 

It’s rare for decision-makers - especially those in the B2B space - to read about your solution (even your case studies) and immediately go with it. What happens more often is that they’ll probably compare it to other similar products/services on the market. 

Buyers use a lot of touchpoints. We typically see anywhere from 10 to 20+ digital touchpoints before B2B prospects inquire about a solution during a visit to a webpage. This doesn’t include prior visits and any other content consumed on social media or through referrals.

You need to make sure that when decision-makers want to compare solutions like yours to other solutions, your site comes up. One way to do that is by comparing your solution to other solutions yourself, i.e., targeting comparison keywords (“vs.”). 

The key is to make sure your comparison looks objective and not like you’re just trying to bash other providers. 

Some companies worry that publishing comparison posts will bring attention to their competitors. But if you’re a smaller organization or a startup, you’ve got more to win than lose. 

Your target audience already knows about your competitors, but may not know about you. Targeting “vs.” keywords gives you a way to insert yourself into a searcher’s path when otherwise they probably would have never come across you. 

This is especially true if you target a keyword like “big company vs. bigcompany” with a blog title like “bigcompany vs. bigcompany vs. mycompany.” 

Tip: Visuals, like comparison tables and graphs, work great in comparison posts and can be shared on social media, like LinkedIn, as part of social media marketing. If it looks like valuable content to someone, they may even reshare it. To learn more about content distribution, read our blog post 8 B2B content distribution channels for cybersecurity companies.

3. Don’t use buzzwords 

Certain B2B niches are known for their buzzwords (hello cybersecurity!), but the general consensus among B2B buyers is: They’re really, really annoying. For this reason, it’s probably best to avoid them (unless you’re targeting them strategically and you’re sure they won’t impact your brand negatively, for example, when they’re no longer in “vogue”). 

Buzzwords are especially hated in sales emails and landing pages, but can also ruin blog posts. 

For example, there’s been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) recently, and many companies are trying to insert themselves into conversations around these. 

But it’s not enough to say that your product/service uses AI, ML, automation, etc. You need to explain exactly how - otherwise, you risk sounding like every other company and losing credibility. Don’t ever say anything in a blog that your sales team cannot stand over. 

The worst thing that can happen is a prospective buyer reading your blog post where your solution isn’t explained properly, and they need to look for more information elsewhere on your site. Few will do that, which means you’ve lost a potential conversion. 

Learn more: 7 B2B Blog best practices.

Need Help with B2B Marketing Blogs? 

Writing blog posts isn’t hard. Writing B2B blogs that people actually bother to read and that lead to conversions is. 

Need help creating B2B blog posts? 

Our content marketing agency works with B2B companies to help them execute their B2B marketing strategies through content creation, be it blog posts, thought leadership articles on third-party publications, webinar, and podcast scripts, and email marketing campaigns. 

Get in touch with us.