I spoke a few years ago with a marketing consultant who told me that when she makes marketing plans for her clients, she rarely includes the content for a B2B blog—because it's too much work.

That's a shame, because that work is where real opportunity lies.

The main goal of your organization's B2B blog should be to develop a long-term relationship with your audience. In other words, you want to make them a group of believers.

Generally, the more detailed a blog post is, and the more examples it has, the more believable your content is. Readers will see your thoroughness, and even if they don't read the entire post they'll be impressed by your expertise.

That's the first step to building an audience that believes in you, and it's why I'm not a fan of posts shorter than 1,000 words: I don't think they can cover a subject sufficiently enough to establish yourself as an expert.

This article contains five tactics that will help to build your B2B blog into one with a faithful audience.

1. Tell a story of personal transformation

People love stories. Good storytelling makes your audience empathize with the protagonist, often to the extent that they start to feel the same emotions and want to act the same way. That's a great basis for building a faithful audience.

The hero's journey is probably the most prominent storyline in screenwriting and literature (think the Bible or Star Wars).

But that doesn't mean your content post has to include all 12 stages of Joseph Campbell's hero journey. B2B marketing company Velocity Partners suggests a simpler plot line: one of transformation. But I think you can make it even simpler: Tell a story of failure or setback that was overcome.

Most CEOs don't want to tell stories about how they failed, which is unfortunate, because it's one of the easiest ways to connect with your audience: Everyone has setbacks and failures, and we all want to overcome them.

Here's an example from a CEO who thought things would be simple, but they weren't:

(Intro paragraph from Crawling the TOR Network: Challenge Accepted)

The post goes on to explain that the project ended up being completely different from what he originally thought—and how that was OK. It gives specific examples of how he and his team learned and grew from the experience.

2. Share data that no one else has

Another way to make your audience believe in you is to back up your ideas with your own data.

Here are a few of ways to do this:

  • Share customer data.
  • Share data from a survey of your customers.
  • Share data from your product or service that you can get from your data team.

You may need to anonymize the data, but numbers should tell the story even without the names of your customers.

In the below case, a client of mine has Web datasets specific to it about uses of the word "coronavirus" in various documents. The company gives away these datasets, which are derived from news sites, blogs, discussion forums, and reviews on the Web.

(Source: Coronavirus datasets)

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Five Ways to Win a Faithful Audience With Your B2B Blog

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Tamar Weiss

Tamar Weiss is a B2B content writer specializing in the data-as-a-service (DaaS), data analysis, and cybersecurity industries.

LinkedIn: Tamar Weiss