80% of B2B brands say they use corporate blogs as part of their marketing strategy, according to the latest CMI Benchmark Report — that’s an increase from the year before too. Yet only 60% of them said it was an effective strategy for them. That’s why, in a previous article on this site, I talked about how B2B corporate blogging isn’t just about the writing.

B2B brands understand that a good blog does many things for them. Everything from driving inbound traffic to the site to setting them up as thought leaders in their market, and more. This is why you’re seeing more blogs on B2B websites. Why they’re also hiring professional writers like you to handle the content generation and strategy for them

For those of you who’ve been working with your blogging clients for a while and want to really crank things up, or for those of you who want to start blogging with a bang, here are three ways you can do that.

Learn how to curate content in a blog

Once the domain of social media networks, content curation on blogs is a simple way to crank up a B2B blog. What is content curation? Well, it’s the collecting and sharing of relevant content. You find content you think your audience would find interesting and/or helpful, and you share it with them.

On social media networks like Twitter, that means retweeting a message; while on Pinterest it means pinning an image.

The concept works just as simply on a B2B blog too. You can curate posts, tweets, images, photos, infographics, stats, quotes from marketing experts, and more. Just deliver the content in a way that’s relevant to your followers.

For example, you could take an infographic and:

• Write a summary blog post on the topic covered by the infographic.
• Write a series of posts based on the items in each section of the infographic.
• Find more stats relevant to the topic, and then write your own blog post on it.
• Simply share the infographic on your blog using the embed code it came with, and say that you liked it. (Most good infographic publishers include the embed code since they want it to reach as wide an audience as possible.)

Curating content has a few benefits to B2B blog owners: it saves them from having to brainstorm new blog ideas; they’re easy to turn around since you’re using content or ideas already created by someone else; plus you’ll reach new audiences if the sources you’re curating from also share your blog posts.

Jump on the video bandwagon

At least 75% of business executives told Forbes they watch work-related videos on business websites at least once a week. 65% of them visit the marketer’s website after viewing the video — that’s just for videos posted on YouTube.

 

 

After watching a video, business site visitors are compelled to visit the vendor’s website, or conduct a search for the vendor, their products, or services. Almost half of the C-level executives then made a business-related purchase. Need I go on? Creating videos to publish on the B2B blog is an extremely effective way to get attention, visitors, and increase site conversions.

How can you use videos in a B2B blog? You can use them a number of ways: including creating your own videos and embedding them into posts, or using the videos as inspiration for posts (it’s another great way to curate content).

Make friends with the sales team

Having a strong partnership between sales and marketing ensures that any B2B company succeeds. That’s because they take care of two different segments of the audience: marketing typically deals with content for prospects, while sales typically deals with the leads, converting them into customers. As you know, the B2B buying cycle is a long one, so it’s possible for a website visitor to be in either category when viewing a B2B blog.

Getting content ideas from both areas of a company can help develop the relationship with both types of site visitors, thereby making each team’s job much easier. However that will only happen if the two teams work together to create a content strategy. This partnership will help the B2B company grow more easily (and probably quickly as well).

Starting a B2B blog and hiring a professional writer like you to create content for it is just the beginning of the journey to a successful, lead generating, and converting blog. These tactics will help you take any blog you’re writing to the next level. Do you have a tip of your own? Share it in the comments.