1. What do you want to achieve with the business blog?

Content marketing is a good strategy for B2B organisations. But only if you know your target audience and what you want to achieve can you create effective content. Of course, once in a while, it is fine to type up a blog about a topic you just came across. But if you want to achieve the desired result, preparation is key. A business blog can be a good starting point in your content marketing strategy, but you need to:

• remember well why you started the blog
• know your ideal customer(s) and
• name what you want to achieve with the specific blog articles.

Chances are you've once set up a business blog to show your contacts that you know about the subject (brand attitude & brand trust) or to attract more traffic to your website (brand awareness). And whether or not the blog is part of a strategic approach. As far as I am concerned, the only proper content marketing strategy or inbound marketing strategy reads like this: "Offer relevant and valuable content at exactly the right time within the individual customer journey and invite consumers to take the next step". So for each content item, you need to know what you want to achieve (goal) and how to guide people to the next customer stage (interaction).

For the blog article you are reading now, I wrote down "I would like persona Martin - through this blog article - to know about Centagon's existence and I would like to offer him valuable tools to improve his content marketing - in the form of a buyer persona template or a blog article template and the SEO scan - for free. "

It's a SMART objective: specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and time-bound. In it, I also state right away what I want people to do during or after reading my blog. In return for the valuable content, I ask them to leave their name and e-mail address. In this way, I have the opportunity to use marketing automation to send the most specific and relevant content possible in successive emails, targeting the next conversion.

More specific = always better To make the objective for your blog article as specific as possible, you need to know who your ideal customers are. Big brands like IKEA, NIBE and BASF all use the buyer persona method. The buyer persona is a fictional person who represents a piece of your target audience. A persona provides information about age, job, education level, family circumstances, motivations, most used online channels, and so on. By doing research, you can identify the characteristics and behaviour of your target audience. For instance, you analyse the characteristics of your best customers and perform competitive analysis. Then you translate the most important information per type of customer into a buyer persona, so you can always easily empathise with your ideal customer. If you have different target groups, create several personas.

2. Do keyword research for your business blog

So now you know for whom and why you are going to write an article. Now it is important to think carefully about what you are going to write. You find topics by exploring the possible overlap between what your ideal client is concerned with (in this blog "corporate blog") and where your organisation's knowledge can add value (in this blog "content marketing"). If you have a particular topic, use, for example, the Keyword Planner in Google Ads or Ubersuggest.com to find out which search terms your target audience uses most. You simply start by entering your topic and then look at the search volume of related search terms and queries. Some tools also indicate how much competition you can expect at the SEA or SEO level.

There are two strategies for arriving at good search terms for new content:

1. Long-tail search terms: choose a very specific search term that has very little search volume but is very relevant in relation to your product or service. The competition is then very low and so is the volume, but the conversion rate can be very high.

2. Topic clusters: A specific search term with average volume that will lead to a pillar page about the topic cluster. It is a detailed explanation of a particular topic that is closely related to a number of other topics and is part of overarching topic. For example, this blog article is part of the topic cluster 'content marketing'.

Optimise your article based on that search term. For instance, reflect it in the title, the URL, the text, the image descriptions and the meta description. By doing keyword research, you ensure that people are going to see your content at the right time at the right time. Instead of putting an advertising message under the nose of your potential target group at a random time (traditional marketing communication), consumers are now able to find your brand themselves at the moment they need you. So true inbound marketing! And inbound marketing strategy delivers results.

3. Make use of structured data

How you format an article on your business blog can also improve the findability of your blog. A relatively new way of search engine marketing is to use structured data. If you present information structured in schema markup (JSON LD, Microdata, JDFa), search engines can read it easily.

Structured data allows you to be found better in Google via featured snippets (highlighted above and beside search results), but also via voice search. You can apply structured data to FAQs, tutorials, videos, events and recipes, for example. You can also communicate your social media channels, addresses, phone numbers, stock information and in which countries you operate.

If your article can be found better by search engines and digital assistants, more people will be exposed to your blog article. Moreover, people are more likely to click on a featured snippet than on other search results. So your business blog will be visited more.

4. Make it personal

The form of the blog article also has an impact on the result. Storytelling can be a strong tool to get your story across. Think of blog titles like "How a 70-year-old woman runs the half marathon within an hour despite her bad joints". Such a story acts as social proof, a persuasion technique we are all susceptible to. In business blogging, you can use user cases, testimonials, quotes and interviews to use social proof.

When the above methods are not or hardly possible and your content is mainly educational, you can use personalisation. You/you combined with advice in imperative tense to keep it short and sweet. complement with a personal anecdote. All these methods make readers of your business blog more involved (engaged). It has been proven that this higher engagement creates a greater effect on brand attitude; readers are more likely to rate your brand more positively after reading your business blog.